BitTorrent is one of those infamous internet companies. Most people who have spent any amount of time online are likely to have heard of the company, as they rose to notoriety for their file sharing software. Well recently BitTorrent have been spreading their wings and have been looking to offer more than just file sharing technology. Ironically, BitTorrent are quite keen on protecting your privacy and last month launched their new Bleep app. In short, this is an app which allows private instant messaging between users. There has been a lot of controversy in the news recently about security and in particular cloud storage and how secure it is. This is where Bleep is hoping to market itself. The trick to Bleep’s ultimate privacy is that it does not store your messages on their cloud servers. Instead, the message is sent directly from your device to the recipient’s device. The only problem with this, is that both members need to be online to send messages to each other.
Well, BitTorrent updated the app today to offer offline messaging support. Now users can send messages to users who are not currently online. However, there is one caveat. The message still cannot be sent until both users are actually online. As there are no servers in use by BitTorrent, the messages cannot be sent until the recipient makes a connection at which point the message is delivered. You might say, well this is not true offline messaging and you are right. It is not. But you can at least send a message without having to wait for the recipient to come online. When they eventually do, the message will be delivered.
To add to this, the BitTorrent team did comment in their blog post that they are working on full offline compatibility and this will be available soon. Once this is made available, users won’t need to be simultaneously online for a message to be sent. If you are wondering how BitTorrent will achieve this without cloud storage then it is worth noting BitTorrent are keeping their secrets safe. The announcement did state that they will use their Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to ‘temporarily’ store offline messages. Beyond this, the blog post only noted that they will “explain this in detail” soon. Do you use Bleep? How do you like it? Are you waiting for true offline support? Let us know your thoughts.