If you’ve ever engaged in a bit of back-and-forth with another Twitter user and you realized you needed to take the conversation off of everyone else’s timeline, you may have had to resort to multiple direct messages, e-mail, Skype, or any number of alternative communication methods. Even the dreaded “telephone” you’ve seen in the movies.
New startup “Blether” (it’s technically written “!blether”) provides a dead-simple way to quickly initiate a private chat room with other Twitter users. You begin a tweet with “!b”, add whomever you want to chat with (you can add multiple people), and your message. Basically, your tweet would look something like: !b @person-one @person-two Hey, do you guys have a quick second to chat?
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Moments later, everyone who’s involved with the chat will get a Twitter mention from the “Bella Blether” account with a link to a freshly-built private chatroom. Wait for everyone to pop inside and—boom—you’re chatting.
I had some initial trouble with the chat stream not auto-updating in the Google Chrome web browser, a glitch Blether CEO and founder Kevin Bradshaw attributed to “an issue with a certain extension in Chrome” that “maybe one in 500 people are seeing,” but once I switched over to Firefox, everything worked as advertised. I’ll be sending the team a list of my Chrome extensions to see if they can pinpoint which one is causing trouble.
The interface itself is clean and simple, and it works without the need for a special app, so smartphone users can hop right into a chat with desktop users without missing any of the action.
And with that, let’s move on to five questions with Blether CEO and founder Kevin Bradshaw.
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