Twiddla. A free online collaboration tool which has a number of very nice features. One it’s free. Two, it’s got a no-brainer interface which makes it really easy to set up and run a group collaboration. You can set meetings up as private or public, and there are a bunch of useful tools available, including annotation icons and shapes.

Basically it’s a great product for whiteboarding or testing out website designs with teams of remote people, without having to deal with a clunky or complex interface. And three, text chat comes as default, but there’s also a voice chat button which links directly to the Java based Phonefromhere voice conferencing service. Nice feature.

Unfortunately it’s very much an early beta work, and this translates into a very sluggish feel, at least when I used it. It can take ages for a mouse click to translate into action, and some actions take literally more than a minute to manifest. It may be my browser (Firefox) or some peculiarity of my set up (i.e. Firefox plugins clash), but I found it a bit frustrating.

But it’s definitely got great potential as an application, no question, and one that I can see lots of people using once the kinks are ironed out. And the coolest thing about the app is the team behind it, Expat Software. Nice!