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Introducing Dialoggs

This week my friend Drew Wilson and I launched Dialoggs into private beta. Simply put, Dialoggs is what you get when you combine the social network of Twitter, a few privacy controls from Facebook, and the multimedia features of Tumblr.

Just like Twitter, you can follow other users on Dialoggs and they can follow you. You can send a private message to any user who follows you, much like a Twitter DM. If you see an interesting post, you can repost it to all of your followers (similar to a retweet). So far, nothing surprising.

If you use Twitter and follow a lot of people, it can be hard to keep track of conversations, whether they’re in the form of replies or mentions to someone in the conversation. Thankfully, the grass really is greener on Dialoggs. Anyone can create a dialogg so people know the general theme or topic for posts. People can also follow dialoggs (of course, dialoggs can’t follow anyone :). This means that whenever you make a post into a dialogg, anyone who follows the dialogg will see the post, even if they don’t follow you.

In addition to mentioning other users, you can mention a dialogg using the @username/dialogg syntax. For example, if you mention @amir/new-music then your post will show up in the mentions stream of all of the dialogg’s members (including its creator, me) if the dialogg is invite-only (see below).

By default, a dialogg is public and allows anyone to post, but it can be set as invite-only so only specific users are allowed to make posts into it, but everyone can see them. You can allow those users to invite other users, so membership management (ie. posting privileges) can be shared.

screenshot of dialogg permissionsscreenshot of dialogg permissions

If you want something more controlled, you can create a private dialogg, which is always invite-only. All posts made into a private dialogg are not visible anywhere unless you’re logged in and a member of that dialogg. Private dialoggs are great for internal team collaboration and anything that’s confidential. Obviously, it’s not possible to follow private dialoggs.

When creating a dialogg, it’s possible to set the first post as sticky,” meaning the post will stay at the top in the stream of posts for the dialogg as the user scrolls through it.

Now that we’re done discussing features, how about some real-world examples (“use cases” as some people say) of what you can do with Dialoggs:

I’m really excited about what we have planned for the next few months! Take a look at the Dialoggs roadmap to see what’s brewing and don’t forget to follow @amir on Dialoggs!

Posted on 27 April 2012






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