A third-party Twitter app now allows people to conduct private chats, with multiple users. The Boston startup Blether Labs, which is also based in Scotland, introduced a beta version of !blether on Tuesday, taking their name from a Scottish slang word for chat – “blether”.
Starting a private group chat is pretty straight forward; you simply type “!b” at the beginning of a tweet, and then add the handles of the people you want to invite to talk. The people you mentioned will receive a tweet containing a clickable URL that takes them to blether’s site which functions as a private chat room, accessed using your Twitter ID. We tried this earlier in the office and it seemed that if you are the person initiating the conversation, you need to go to your ‘Mentions’ after sending the invitation tweet to find the blether URL.
Company President David Gerzof Richard says: “Twitter’s a great platform for connecting with like-minded people, but if you ever get a group of people together, DM is kind of stuck at being just a singular conversation between two people”. He also feels that conversations can be somewhat limited and confusing due to the 140 character limit.
Whatever you get up to on Twitter, don’t forget that you can back up all of your tweets, mentions, messages, followers, following and profile with SocialSafe. Soon we’ll be releasing the scheduled backup feature, so once you’ve set it up, you can relax knowing that your offline social journal is saving your tweets and followers without you having to remember to do so.