Now We Can Rig Up Twitter "Groups"

I do something similar to this for a group that I'm involved in. We have a registered twitter account. This account follows all of the group members. If a member direct messages the group account, this message is rebroadcast.

This works regardless of which way twitter decides to go with their settings.

The only downside is that unlike the solution mentioned in the article, our solution requires a cron job to poll twitter for any DMs to the group account.

Or, you could use a service that supports this kind of functionality and not run the risk of having to turn lemons into lemonade again when twitter makes a change that shuts out the small percentage of users who are working around deficiencies in their system.

Sending message to specific people or groups? Im pretty sure this is called Instant Messenger.