Vincent Gonzalez' essay at Religion Dispatches does a great job of describing both what Penance (an application released for the iPhone in early December, allowing users to absolve one another’s sins) is and how the experience using it feels. His more reflective obsevrvations include:

• Such a system demands a temporal rather than eternal perspective.
• the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology
• We forget too easily that online facelessness also facilitates the sacred possibilities of the masked ritual, the voting booth, and the therapist’s couch.
• From their first moments, online spaces have mingled the privacy of the truck stop bathroom wall and that of the confessional.