With 200 million tweets a day, there is no doubt that micro-blogging site Twitter is popular world-wide, and yet, it would not be an exaggeration to say that at times, Tweeters have missed the luxury of a ‘discussion’ or ‘chat’ on Twitter.
While there are many who feel that Twitter should add a feature that enables realtime, private and longer-form conversations, there are others who feel that Twitter should stay simple in terms of UI and instead allow third-party developers to be the ones to add further social and chat features from the outside. One such believer is Ethan Gahng, founder of IM service Joint. Joint has gone one step further and converted this belief into reality.
On Friday, Joint introduced a feature which turns any Twitter hashtag into an Internet Relay Channel (IRC)- like chat room, which is integrated with a real-time hashtag stream from Twitter.
This allows users to participate in a prominent real-time group chat feature which populates with a live hashtag feed in the right sidebar. Users can then invite the people who wrote the tweets into the group chat or directly pull the hastags into the group chat. They could also simply hang out and enjoy synchronous chat and watch as the tweet stream populates.
This is different from third-party apps like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck which only lets you track hashtags. To be able to watch someone tweet ,from outside, and invite them in and chat with them immediately is the advantage that makes the difference between Joint and the other third party apps, really big.
For certain conversations the Twitter ‘@ replies’ are inadequate and we are forced to DM or conduct the conversation elsewhere. Now, with the Joint IRC feature, users can easily join a group chat, as well as discuss popular hashtags. Currently, the ‘#irene’ is under much discussion and Joint could become a useful resource for people to congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or live events.
The other noteworthy aspect of Joint is that it functions as an off-the-record conversation medium for Tweeps, in that if a person is in conversation and a third person joins the chat room, they will not be able to see the ongoing conversation. Gahng says that this is intended to make Joint group chat more like a real-life chat.
One more advantage Joint offers is that it makes it easy to search for different hashtags, discuss and follow them synchronously in realtime. Though it is easy to connect with other people on Twitter, it is actually difficult to get to know them and many people do not follow hashtags in their daily Twitter usage.
Moreover, since tweeting with hashtags means that tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, many people do not like having public conversations, especially about private issues, on Twitter. By providing the added social flexibility to Twitter users, Joint also extends incentives to other third-party Twitter apps.
Going beyond the ability to follow a hashtag group, Joint also informs a user when a new user enters a chat room, gives search descriptions and enables users to browse the main directory or even start their own hashtag channel.
The Joint team, which does not have any affiliation with Twitter, has been working on this feature since January and in March, they offered an IM chat-room version to Twitter. If the IRC version functions in real-time without any hiccups, Joint certainly stands a chance of being noticed by the biggies in the social media arena.
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