Talko – Talk. Share. Do. – Predicting a Winner

Yesterday, a lot of us read about Ray Ozzie’s latest venture, Talko,  in the media. The guy does know how to get the word out. That and the fact that he basically invented Lotus Notes, built and sold Groove to Microsoft, became Microsoft’s chief technical officer or chief software architect (or whatever, depending on where you read it), and left Microsoft to, well, “Beyond that, Ray has no plans at this time“. Oh, and Groove is under the hood in OneDrive for Business. Comments on that last one withheld.

All kidding aside, in my playing around with Talko yesterday with Kris Wagner (@SharePointKris) and a few of my other nerd friends, I think Ray and the boys may have Another Big Thing here.

The big benefit of Talko in my mind is to bring all of the disjointed “conversations” we have across different tools on our phones together in one interface. How often do you start a “conversation” in texts (maybe surreptitiously from an another meeting), then move to email (at your desk after the meeting), then maybe call (once you realize that it’s easier than typing)?

With Talko, that can all happen in one annotated stream. You can flip from mode to mode in the stream painlessly. That gives you a mixed media record of the *real* conversation. No more hunting for “Where did Kris say that thing about…”. I can picture people basically living in the Talko app rather than flipping from one app to another. Once they have our captive attention, they can do with us what they choose.

This is what Skype or Lync should or could be, IMO. Ray’s going to give them a run for their money. I can hear the network admin conversations starting already about how to block Talko in the “enterprise”. Like Dropbox, it’s going to fill a need that people didn’t know they had and organizational secrets will be flying through the airwaves. I predict it’s a winner.