I inter­viewed Tan­gler CEO, Mar­tin Wells, for an upcom­ing post at Web Worker Daily (should be up some time in the next day or so). Mar­tin had a lot of inter­est­ing things to say, so here’s the com­plete inter­view for your read­ing pleasure.

Martin’s a great guy. Very pas­sion­ate about his prod­uct and his team, and it shows. The Tan­gler crew are work­ing very hard to make the prod­uct dif­fer­ent. Check it out.

On to the interview.

I’m speak­ing with Mar­tin Wells, CEO of new Web 2.0 col­lab­o­ra­tion startup Tan­gler. Mar­tin, Hi. Wel­come to acidlabs!

Hey Steve. Thanks for the opportunity.

So, let’s get started. What was your moti­va­tion behind Tangler?

Tan­gler really started from the frus­tra­tion of using web forums; we wanted to make it eas­ier for peo­ple to engage in dis­cus­sion about the things they care about. Forums are very acces­si­ble, but they tended to be clunky and hard to use. They also became silos that lim­ited dis­cus­sion to a sin­gle place. We wanted to set group dis­cus­sion free — if it loves you it will come back! — by mak­ing it inde­pen­dent and ubiq­ui­tous. Talk about what you want, wher­ever you want.

How is Tan­gler dif­fer­ent to other forum and real-​​time col­lab­o­ra­tion tools such as Google Groups, Skype and forums in var­i­ous places?

From a fea­ture stand­point Tan­gler blurs the lines between what you might think of as tra­di­tional instant mes­sag­ing, chat, mail­ing lists and forums. We’re web-​​based and top­i­cally struc­tured like a forum, but inter­ac­tion is real-​​time, like instant mes­sag­ing. We also sup­port desk­top noti­fi­ca­tion, so you don’t need to stay in the browser to be part of the con­ver­sa­tion. The result is just bet­ter web-​​based com­mu­ni­ca­tion amongst groups of people.

Tan­gler is also a social sys­tem, so users can add each other as friends and keep track of what they’re talk­ing about.

Tell us about some of the unique fea­tures of Tan­gler and how they work.

The mix of per­sis­tent, real-​​time, struc­tured dis­cus­sion is some­what unique; though there have been plenty of attempts at inno­vat­ing on per­sis­tent dis­cus­sion already.

The real value though sits in Tangler’s approach to cre­at­ing a net­work of dis­cus­sion, acces­si­ble from every­where — such as being embed­ded inside a web­site or blog. We want peo­ple to talk about things where they are, rather than where the dis­cus­sion sys­tem hap­pens to be. And we do that whilst still offer­ing the power of a cen­tralised dis­cus­sion sys­tem through groups, track­ing and a social struc­ture. We’d like to call it “dis­cus­sion 2.0″, but I think we’d have to take the e out of our name to really pull that off.

Who do you see being the tar­get audi­ence for Tan­gler, and why?

Tan­gler is a broad tool, and it’s open to any­body right now. If you have a group of peo­ple who you think would ben­e­fit from using a web-​​based dis­cus­sion tool then jump in and cre­ate a group. You can also just browse around the exist­ing net­work, there’s about 400 pub­lic groups to choose from so far.

One of our early focuses though is in help­ing other Web 2.0 com­pa­nies use Tan­gler as a feed­back sys­tem. Com­pa­nies like Omnidrive, Par­ti­cls and Cluztr have found it to be a pow­er­ful way of build­ing a com­mu­nity around their prod­ucts. They get a great tool for gath­er­ing feed­back and inter­act­ing with their users, as well as the added ben­e­fit of an exist­ing audi­ence already test­ing other prod­ucts. So far about 30 com­pa­nies are using the sys­tem, with more join­ing each day.

Can you give us a sneak peek at some of the new fea­tures planned for Tangler?

We’re still in beta, so there’s lots to do. The big ones would be RSS, an open API and tag­ging. Sup­port for embed­ding real-​​time dis­cus­sion inside other web sites is also com­ing soon.

Mar­tin, thanks for your time. Good luck to you and the Tan­gler Team!

If you’re inter­ested in more cov­er­age of Tan­gler, you should also check out Allen Stern’s video review at Cen­ter­Net­works.