I think it's kinda clever.

It reminds me of my reaction when I saw Reddit. "Well, this is new, but I can't imagine anyone ever doing something useful with it." I was right about the first part, right about the second, but completely wrong about the implicit assumption that things have to be useful before they'll be used.

Agree with the first two parts, although I do think Reddit serves a useful purpose. I don't use it because news.YC and Digg provide me with more than enough to digest every day.

Back to the point, though: who do you see as the target demographic of overhear.us?

I suppose when I think about work, I think of my parents, and despite being technologically capable, 1) this site would get blacklisted where they work and 2) I can't see them sitting in front of a computer at home gossiping, although they do talk about work quite a bit

I figure it's made for the younger FaceBook generation who're just now entering the workplace and want a place to gripe about FaceBook being blocked at work.

I can certainly see this being more appealing to them (us) as a generation, but I still think the fear of getting caught will outweigh the desire to post one's thoughts online in many cases, especially when it isn't all that hard (and is actually more useful for one's social life) to talk to someone at the office, be it at the water cooler, in the hallway, in your own office with the door closed, or at lunch or dinner.

I don't know. This has the potential to get under a lot of people's skin, and that's always a good thing from a VC point of view.

I can realistically envision people saying "they banned overhear.us at work" in a few months.

Question though: What stops this from being a platform for marketing - i.e. Is there a danger that the company floods the forum with bad info? What about insider information? Are you not liable if I post that my company is tanking this quarter?

It remains to be seen whether it's the best YC can come up with. The bar has been set pretty high (Reddit, though some, including Paul, consider Loopt the best one so far...I think I disagree with him on that, though Sam is a damned impressive fellow).