Peerly: A connected Twitter messenger for iOS and Android, complete with video chat.

With zillions of messenger apps floating around out there the last thing this world needs is another messenger app, except maybe when it does.

Twitter has become rather prolific, one of the largest user bases out there. Many of us use it daily. Compelling as the thought may be, its not enough to build a Twitter messenger with video chat for iOS and android, it had to be something much more valuable than just another messenger.

Looking at all the growth in messenger businesses in the last 5 years we see a distinct pattern: Skype, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Line, Wechat — these are all closed networks. Even the largest mobile vendors are reading from the same page. Apple with FaceTime, Google with Hangouts and there are literally hundreds of others. Very few will interoperate with each other, but does anyone care? We believe they would if the value proposition is high enough.

What if we brought communications to communities instead of just building in a silo? In order to add real value, our connected Twitter messenger needed to be easy to federate with other networks and we needed 3rd party + Enterprise directory integration as well.

The network needed to be primarily P2P (peer to peer). This would be easier to maintain, cheaper to run and inherently more secure, one where none of the private and public keys are stored on a server.

It took a while, but we finally shipped something we could call a private beta release.

Today, we are excited to bring you Peerly! A Twitter messenger for iOS and Android.

You can sign up here, for early access to Peerly.

We shared a preview with Jason Calacanis on the weekend, who then shared it with some of the Twitter folks, thanks Jason! Trent Johnsen, (Hookflash, CEO) will be present for the festivities at Launch early this week as well.

A snapshot of what Peerly (beta 1) holds in store:

• Twitter Sign-on & Authentication
  (no need to remember another login)
• Twitter Friends
  (you follow each other, now chat)
• Group text messaging
• Offline messaging
  (notifications mainly)
• Voice and video chat
  (high quality calls in just one tap)
• Recent Chats
• P2P Ciphers
  (no servers collecting data here)
• Enterprise APIs
  (OAuth APIs for your own directory, bit of hand-holding required)

Take Peerly for a spin and send us your thoughts!

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