UK are a nation of curtain twitchers

A social experiment which left a clearly labelled ‘journal’ on a table at a busy coffee shop in Central London saw three out of five people (60%) surreptitiously pick up and become engrossed in genuine, handwritten diary entries dealing with a wide range of deeply personal subjects – including losing a parent and even sex fantasies.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in a nation where soap operas prove time and again to be the highest-rated TV shows, a new social network featuring over 23,000 (and growing) real-life diary entries from real people has proven a huge hit with nosey Britons – and particularly with women. With the average visitor staying on the website for a staggering average of ten minutes, Pencourage (www.pencourage.com,) - which officially launches this week - has racked over half a million page views; has been dubbed the ‘anti-social network’ and the ‘real-life Facebook’ for its salacious tradition of anonymous truth-telling.

The explosion in anonymous apps recently prove the need for an escape from the relentless pressures to appear successful and happy on social media, where we can easily compare ourselves to others in a never-ending online one-upmanship…

Where Facebook allows us to edit our profiles, create air-brushed versions of ourselves and pressures us to keep up with others as we lay open our lives to people who know us, Pencourage fills a niche where people can be 100% honest with their thoughts knowing they are not being judged.

Pencourage acts like an online journal, allowing subscribers to create an authentic, permanent and detailed account of their lives. Users can write what they want; from their latest affair to the boss they despise without anyone discovering their true identity, with usernames and emails being private to everyone, including the website’s staff!

Based on journal entries, Pencourage demonstrates the importance of recording our daily lives in an honest way, rather than through fake statuses, and shows that no matter how sentimental or explicit users’ stories are there are thousands of people with likeminded thoughts and going through similar things.

For more informsation visit www.pencourage.com