As enterprise social networking has taken off, the notion of collaboration has increasingly been seen as a written thing.  It makes a lot of sense, in that it allows conversations to be archived and searchable, thus hopefully creating both accountability and a knowledge base for others to tap into.  Which is great, except it overlooks the verbal conversations we often have.  How can those be included into the knowledge base?

A new service called Talko believe they may have the answer.  Talko is a mobile app that aims to merge verbal conversations with the kind of message streams that are commonplace on enterprise social networks.  Their aim is to help teams to organize and collaborate faster and more effectively.

Using the service is pretty straightforward.  Users record a message and can then send it or attach it to a particular discussion thread.  They can also add meta information to each message, including a subject line, tags and priority status.  What’s more, users also have the ability to bookmark particular parts of the audio recording for easier retrieval later on.

Each message can also have various multimedia attached to it, whether that’s an image, some documents or text.  You can also have live, streamed conversations if other participants are available at the same time as you.

It’s an interesting service.  Will it revolutionize how we interact at work?  Probably not, and indeed I’m struggling to really see how it could be anything but annoying. It’s been developed by former Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie though so does have a degree of clout behind it.

If you want to try it out, it’s a free iOS app.  Download it and give it a go.  Maybe you’ll like the concept more than me.