Quick Pitch: Bccthis is an innovative technology that provides new levels of communication for email, micro-blogging and social networking services.
Genius Idea: If you've ever worked in an environment that shares a group mailing list, you know that at some point, side conversations about a certain topic start to take place off-list with a number of the participants. Sometimes you might want to add more background details or make clarifications, other times you're -- we'll admit it -- making fun of something the author of one of the threads said.
Bccthis is a tool that embraces the fact that private conversations often form around public streams. They've created an Outlook plugin, a Twitter web-app, and soon, a BlackBerry application, to streamline these types of conversations.
The Outlook plugin adds in a separate body and recipient field to a message. The Twitter app -- via a bookmarklet -- lets you bcc people on a tweet in the form of direct messages. You can see the Twitter features in action in this video:
Once you've started a Bccthis conversation, you can view it in its entirety online and you can also invite others into the discussion.
We like the idea of having an easy way to annotate or create separate conversations around a public system. While using Bccthis on your corporate e-mail account might not be the best idea, we can see it being useful for creating separate discussions without clogging up a larger feed.
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