Anchor is Like Facebook, But More Fun, More Useful And For Coworkers Only [Daily Freebie]

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The Cult of Mac team used Glassboard to help coordinate our reporting efforts at this year’s CES back in January. It was quick, simple, tied us all together and made the show a little less crazy.

This time around, maybe we’ll dump Glassboard for Anchor, released today. It’s an app with the same basic idea — hanging out and communicating with all your teammates through your iPhone — but with a heavy slant toward fun. And if anything is a great antidote for crazy, it’s fun.

Despite developer Tomfoolery‘s insistence that Anchor is all play and no work, the app is actually pretty useful. The first step is to create teams; these can be themed around specific projects, shifts or just lunch buddies.

Once that’s done, Anchor makes it simple to chat to the whole group, or ping just one person. There’s a group activity feed that displays status updates, shared photos, links, locations and tags. Unlike with Glassboard, there’s no way to share videos (videos can indeed be shared).

But the big thing here that Tomfoolery really seems to want you to do with Anchor is to loosen up a little and get friendly with your co-workers. An example: The profile page contains a remarkably sophisticated and deep photo editing suite, complete with multiple effects, a blemish remover and even stickers. Is a cat wearing a fez an ideal profile pic for the group’s IT guru? Maybe.

Unfortunately, right now Anchor only allows account creation by email addresses that have company domain names (for example,  @cultofmac.com); Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the like aren’t currently supported, though Tomfoolery says that’ll change in the future.

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