The first version of Crème does not support Direct Messages. Here’s why we chose not to include this feature initially.

Crème thinks of Twitter as a public channel. Everything that happens there is public. This is true for most of the Twitter ecology, but there are two exceptions: protected users (which work mostly fine in Crème) and DM.

We make things very clear by only having the public features. If we added DM, we need to be very careful about distinguishing public and private. Mixing public and private has risks. Think about the privacy debates around Google Buzz (mixing private email with public messaging) and Facebook’s confused privacy UI. We avoid all these risks by only having public features. I have also seen several tweets like “Oops, previous one should have been DM” in my Twitter stream.

The strongest data point for initially not having DM is that before public launch, we had a closed beta test with a group of people, and DM did not come up even once. People did not need it.

Whether we will add this feature: if it turns out that a large part of Crème’s buyers really need it, we will. By this point, the need does not seem to be there. Let us know if you think otherwise and use DM a lot. If so, do you DM with many people or just a few? How may DM’s have you sent the last day/week/month?