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Ever wish that Twitter was a good platform for conversations, rather than simply being a way to push announcements at people? Have I got a site for you! Blellow is a new microblogging site, currently in beta, that does it better than Twitter. While the beta is still missing a few useful features, what it does have already shows that the people behind Blellow have a better way to communicate via microblogging.

At first glance, Blellow seems quite a bit like Twitter, but right away you can see improvements over that venerable service. For example, conversations are much easier to follow, thanks to the ability to target particular messages for replies. No longer do you need a degree in forensic sciences just to piece together an conversation.

Another quickly noticed change is that Blellow posts have a 300 character cap, more than twice that of Twitter! While still requiring posts to be concise, Blellow at least provides enough space to get out a complete thought without needing to compact it into unreadability or split into multiple messages.

Moving on to new features now, we come across Blellow's support for groups. By joining groups, you can follow what's going on on topics of interest, but without needing to follow people first. Groups can be public or private, too! And posting a message to a group is as simple as putting %group into your post (replacing group with the group's short name, of course).

Further, Blellow is looking at ways to be more helpful to professionals. Are you looking for work? Trying to find new employees? Or want to advertise a project? Blellow has you covered, providing both a jobs board and a projects board. As part of the beta, posting on either of these is free until the end of March, but even then, the rates for posting are very inexpensive, and worth it. (Beyond that, it's nice to see a social network launching with a monetization plan in mind!)

Another great addition is built-in support for meetups. If you want to put together a gathering of users, Blellow provides a free meetup board where you can advertise your event to other Blellow users. Of course, you'll still need to advertise the event yourself, but when you add the event, you'll at least have somewhere for invitees to find out the specifics.

Finally, Blellow offers something called kudos, a way to publicly reward people who have provided a good answer to questions you ask on the service. It's still going through development, it seems, but bringing in this feature (which exists in a similar form on my favourite development website, Stack Overflow) is another value-add that you just don't get with Twitter, or for that matter, any other microblogging service.

Despite all these excellent features, however, there are still a few things that Blellow has yet to pull in. For example, there's no built-in support for old-style #hashcodes, nor an easy way to find other users (at the moment, the best thing is hunt for people you know in the groups you've joined). And there's still no public API or even RSS feeds which could be added to the likes of Facebook or FriendFeed. Keeping in mind that the service is still in beta, however, these will show up sooner or later.

In the end, Blellow is what Twitter could have, should have been. It's microblogging done better. So come on over and join! And as usual, you can find me as @coldacid.