A long time ago Tim Oren scribbled this on a napkin to help explain a little of what he learned about collaboration.
We put wikis in the top left, email in the bottom left and IM in the bottom right. He described that at the top right is a collaboration sweet spot, but a place that is very hard to start off with. You create something to the left or below it and try to evolve it. You could easily put Twitter and Socialtext Signals in the top right. Twitter in effect evolved out of eariler learnings from blogging. Signals was an evolution of a social software platform. Good theory, and the point is doing new things in real time is hard.
Today SlideShare launched Zipcast, a web conferencing product that is fast, simple and social. Its a natural evolution of what SlideShare has been, a new way to asynchronously share slides. Its new not just in how it is integrated into the fabric of the real time social web. Building a collaboration solution on top of a thriving professional sharing community with millions of presentations viewed by over 45 million people per month is decidedly new.
If you are in marketing, you can host social webinars with promotion being a byproduct of using it. If you are in sales, you can launch a pitch immeadiately without the complexity of setup and asking someone to install a download. If you simply have an idea to share, there is no stopping you because it is free for public and viral meetings.
And what I really like about is it is web conferencing actually on the web.
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