I'm not a highly social person, so I don't have loads of friends I'm always keeping in touch with -- I hate social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. I suppose I also don't care enough about what other random people say to use something like Reddit. :)
But I do have a very particular group of buddies with whom I keep in close contact. We basically have an ongoing group SMS chat going (and recently switched to GroupMe).
However, while most of us seem to have a lot to say at various times, we're all very busy too, and it can be terribly difficult keeping up with the many different conversations going on in a single group chat when you haven't checked the chat in a day or two!
In the old days (before smart phones) I used to keep in touch with my friends using private message boards -- which was nice because it was topic-centric, but seems clumsy, slow, and over the top in the Cloud/Mobility era. I'm somewhat familiar with business-oriented team chat products like Flowdock, Slack, and HipChat, and these seem to each offer their own approach to topic-centric chat, but of course they're focused on work teams.
Are there any group chat-style apps for both Android and iPhone that support threaded or topic-centric chat for a specific group of friends?
Edit: Also, I'd prefer to keep it private, just between our group, and not available for the world to see (like on Twitter or whatever).
