Talkwheel: roundtable

One problem with many of the most popular social networking sites is that conversations are displayed linearly. This breaks up the discussion and can make it difficult to locate specific parts of a conversation. Talkwheel is changing this with its new user interface.

"Talkwheel is a real-time collaboration platform built around group discussion," explains Jeff Harris, Founder and CEO of Talkwheel. "We believe at Talkwheel that the core of collaboration is actually the discussion. All these companies out there are building a bunch of bells and whistles around the discussion model, but all have really neglected the actual discussion area. In the real world when we're with a group of people, we don't stand in a line and try to talk to each other. We sit around a roundtable and try to create this circular dynamic to get everyone involved...Talkwheel is really trying to keep this round table design and really capture the real world dynamic online."

In Talkwheel, each "wheel" has its own specific group, and you can filter the wheel by topic, time or users (coming soon). This eliminates the need to search through emails or scroll up and down forums to find the information that is most relevant to you. Groups can be private or public, and users can comment to the entire group or send individual, private messages to one other within the groups.

Talkwheel offers both a free social site as well as a version it hopes to sell to businesses. One feature set that has been particularly appealing to business users during beta testing is real-time analytics on all the information shared. "You can get sentiment analysis—what users like and what they don't like about different issues going on," says Harris, "so it's very helpful for HR. Companies are also using this to engage their customers on different focus groups, so you can get a really deep insight on what your employees and customers feel on different issues and topics."

Users can upload photos and videos to a discussion, and these items can be opened within the app, so users do not have to hop from page to page during a discussion. Talkwheel also plans to go mobile soon with apps for iPhone and Android devices.

"We wanted to make Talkwheel very, very viral," explains Harris, "so when you create a wheel, you can invite users who are registered or are unregistered. If I invited an unregistered user, all they have to do is click accept and it automatically registers them. They just type one password, and they're into Talkwheel.