Sorry I haven't been around much the past week. I've been busy with all sorts of future 360 goodness. Duty calls and all that.

Tip:  Talk privately with someone by selecting Private Chat in the Xbox Guide.

You've probably already seen and used this by now, since it's prominently displayed on the Xbox Guide. But I thought I'd still explain a little bit about how it works.

Private chat (called QuickChat during development) is a one-on-one voice chat system. There are a maximum of five channels on the private chat screen: one game channel (if you're in a game), and four private channels. You select one of the private chat channels to invite someone to chat with you. If you're a social butterfly, you can juggle multiple private chats by using the list to switch between channels. When you select one of the channels, the other channels you have open are placed "on hold," (or, as I like to say, "on ignore"). If someone put you on hold and forgot about you, you can page them by moving to the channel you were talking on and pressing Y (Page Gamer). That'll pop a little notification on their screen, reminding them of your existence.

If you send someone an invite, and they don't respond in a certain amount of time, the channel will automatically close. This happens even if they decline the invite right away. You won't be able to tell the difference between someone declining and someone not seeing or ignoring your invite. So don't get too offended when people don't respond to your invite; I know I've missed a couple of invites myself when I'm away getting something to drink or being distracted by something shiny.

I know you're going to ask me what happened to multi-party chat from the original Xbox. For that, I'll refer you to this post from the Xbox development team. Essentially, it's a question of bandwidth. The private chat interface is really meant to handle one-on-one chat and it leaves the multi-party chat for games to handle. As for something outside of private chat that'll do it, who knows. We're listening, and we know it's something you want.

Just to round things out, here's the Xbox.com article about private chat. Have fun!