July 30, 2014

Speak Freely – It’s Person to Person.

The BitTorrent Bleep Pre-Alpha will be available on Windows desktop to start. Easy to use, Bleep offers freedom to communicate over text and voice, person to person.

Hoping for early access to BitTorrent’s first serverless chat client? We have good news. Today, we will begin letting testers try out the Pre-Alpha. We are also unveiling its name: BitTorrent Bleep.

Why Bleep, you might ask? Well, basically, we never see your messages or metadata. As far as we’re concerned, anything you say is “bleep” to us.

And with the susceptibility of communications platforms to snooping and hacking, reminders of which seems to surface every week, we realized that we were uniquely qualified to build a better platform and application.

Our big idea was to apply distributed technology to conversations. That means no servers required. This enables people using Bleep to make a direct, decentralized connection to someone they trust. Bleep offers the freedom to communicate without the risk of metadata being exposed.

Consider Bleep your personal redaction pen controlled by you and only you. Anything you say is Bleep-ed out to us and everyone else for that matter.

This unique approach to communicating will be a great tool for:

Friends keeping conversations amongst friends

Journalists communicating with sources without exposing their identity or their content

Members of the diplomatic corps sharing private dispatches

Businesses keeping communications confidential, safe from leaks, and safe from industrial espionage

Email invitations will start going out today to allow early testers access to our Pre-Alpha build of Bleep for the Windows desktop. Here’s what you need to know about the Pre-Alpha version of Bleep:

It’s Windows 7/8 desktop only (other platforms coming later)

It’s Pre-Alpha, so we’re aware of some bugs and are expecting our testers to find some more

Users can sign-up with email, mobile number, or incognito (unlisted; meaning no account or Personal Identifiable Information is necessary)

Testers will be able to invite friends, but those friends will also need to be using Windows desktop (for now)

Testers will have the option to import their Google address book locally to the application to quickly find friends

Text and voice calls can be made to online contacts (no offline messages, yet)

The visuals, UI, and exposed features are still evolving; what is in the Pre-Alpha is not necessarily final

Currently, an account can only be used on a single device/installation and cannot be moved

If you’ve already signed up as a tester, we’ll be notifying you soon with an email that will include a link to the Windows installer. If you want to get on the list for consideration in this round of testing, you can use this sign-up form.

Thanks for following our development so far, and stay tuned for updates as we roll the learnings from this pre-alpha into the next release.

– Jaehee

For support during the Bleep Pre-Alpha, please visit the Bleep Forum.

Further reading on Bleep: