If you've been on Twitter a while and tried out all of the toys, you might have noticed one little tool missing - group chat. While some of you might be wondering how on earth that works or why you'd want it, some of you will already be itching to know more.
Essentially, Joint [No Longer Available] is a service which lets you turn a Twitter hashtag into an off-Twitter chatroom, enabling people who really want to chat in-depth to do so without flooding their followers with tweets. It also lets you follow and chat live on Twitter using a regular tweet if you want to go back to the public conversation. In short, Joint is a quick way to switch between a public chat and a more private chat on the same topic.
How To Chat On Twitter
Signing up with Joint is simple and it involves a log in to your Twitter account. Joint has an introductory "How does Joint work?" page you can view at anytime if you get lost and forget how to chat on Twitter with Joint.
Joint suggests popular chatrooms to you according to the number of people in the chat at the time, but you can also join or create your own rooms based on any hashtag you like. The chatroom is considered on standby if no-one is currently in the room on Joint.
Joint chatrooms resemble IRC in a way, however they're not connected to any IRC servers and will only work via the Joint website.
Joint will notify you with a beep whenever there's action in the chatroom, but you can adjust your preferences at any time if you don't like it.
All your favourite hashtags will appear alphabetically on the left-hand side and will show you a person icon when there are other people present in the chatroom. From each chatroom, you'll also be able to see public tweets using the same hashtag. Next to each person who has tweeted publicly, you'll see an icon enabling you to quickly invite that person to the Joint chat conversation. It's also possible to share the location of the chat room with Twitter easily.
Twitter Hashtag Use In Chat
Whether you want to chat publicly or privately, Joint is equally useful. It's just a matter of composing your message in the correct box on the page, in the centre at the bottom for private chat or the top right for public chat.
You will also see the public Twitter timeline for the hashtag on the right-hand side of the chatroom, meaning you don't need to use multiple Twitter tools.
Use Joint To Follow A Hashtag On Twitter
Since you can see and make public tweets for a given Twitter hashtag from within Joint, and you have all your favourite hashtags stored for quick use, it makes Joint the ideal go-to place to follow your favourite hashtags. Just head straight to Joint whenever you're feeling particularly chatty and let it serve you the best conversations.
More Twitter Tools
You're obviously keen on Twitter, so here's a bit more to read:
How do you currently track Twitter hashtags? Is a slightly less public hashtag chat like Joint something you would you use or not? Why?