Last month the folks at Contagious magazine told us about a social
networking service for businesses called huddle. After beta-testing the service, they
described it as “myspace for people who want to get stuff done.”
While that sounds like the hype around LinkedIn (which we are all on but don’t use), huddle is about working, not networking. As director Andy McLoughlin explains it, “a huddle is like a
virtual meeting room where you can share documents, create whiteboards (which
are kind of like mini wikis) and plan projects. Huddle allows you to run
several projects (or huddles) concurrently with your dashboard summarising
activity across all of them.”
Today the site went live, having been given the thumbs up by
its beta testers. According to co-director Alistair Mitchell, “the high level
of interest from companies and individuals as far afield as
Asia and across
been able to start signing up paying customers even before the formal launch.” Maybe we’ll sign on when there’s a virtual break room.
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
I have been using this for months, but is called basecamp by 37signals – how is this not a blatant rip off?
February 19th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Not completely convinced. It feels like nothing we haven’t already seen before. There’s several alternatives already out there and Huddle doesn’t seem to be offering any competitive advantage over them.
February 19th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Good to see you guys having a look at it already – thanks for the feedback. You’re right that huddle does some of the things that other tools (eg basecamp) do already, but the devil is in the detail. We actually used a wide variety of these tools when we were building huddle but soon got frustrated by their limitations; either they were too ‘techy’, or they did not handle confidentiality well enough, or they were too expensive, or they had limited document functionality or they did not enable us to hook multiple teams from different organisations into the same interface. So whilst these sorts of systems are great for small/informal projects we found a massive demand amongst SMB’s and the larger corporates for a different way of working; hosted, something that reduced email load by automating document approvals etc, was ‘fun’ to use, low cost, flexible, replicated real life in the way it connected teams BUT had all the features and security of a piece of enterprise software. Hopefully that’s what huddle does – whilst also enabling you to manage big work projects and fun/home projects side by side. Certainly feedback so far from users suggests we might be getting there, but there’s a long way to go so please do sign up and use it in earnest – it would be great to hear some more of your thoughts! Thanks
February 20th, 2007 at 4:54 am