The New Kid on the Block: Tracky for Social Collaboration and Task Management

There are a multitude of tools designed and marketed to improve task management and collaboration. Collaboration–especially with a social component–is becoming a crowded market with solutions such as Yammer, Jive, and others all fighting for dominance. These companies also have the support of major venture capitalists and millions of dollars, and some are already becoming established names in this space, like Yammer, which was recently acquired by Microsoft. Tracky aims to make its mark in the increasingly popular and crowded playground of social collaboration.

What is Tracky?

Characterized by TechCrunch as “part Dropbox, part BaseCamp, Wonderlist and Chatter,” Tracky is more than simple task management. Information is organized as “tracks,” which can be thought of as a to-do list on steroids. Tracks can include everything–from tasks, Tweets, notes, contacts, links, files and more–and are categorized based on topic, project, team, priority, keyword, or deadline. Tracks are organized into trackstreams so that everything can be seen at a glance. Tracky also includes a Drap & Drop Calendar, making it easy to schedule projects and see approaching deadlines. In addition, Tracky provides a gamification aspect to task and project completion by giving out points when a task is completed and allowing collaborators to call out your good work.

Unlike other social collaboration platforms that live behind a corporate firewall, Tracky was built with the purpose of bridging the gap between personal and professional networks. Other social collaboration platforms only allow users to interact with people within their own company. Tracky, on the other hand, allows tracks to be publicly viewed by others, facilitating open collaboration and crowd sourcing from anyone that may be using the platform. Controls can be set to determine which trackstreams are available for public and private view. Other key features include social media integration, cloud syncing and storage, task history and archiving, chat, and time tracking.

Tracky debuted at SXSW Startup Debut this past spring and raised over $1 million in angel funding in March. Signing up for Tracky is as easy as simply entering your email address. Currently, Tracky offers a free version that includes up to 5 projects, public and private controls, and 100 MB file storage. A paid version that starts at $5 per user per month is expected to be rolled out soon.

Will Tracky be able to stand out from the pack? Time will tell. Tracky is entering a crowded market space and is still only in beta; but, Tracky could be an interesting company to keep an eye on thanks to the turbo-charged trackstreams and social collaboration features of its solution.

 
Find additional information on top social collaboration tools, including enterprise social platforms, by downloading the free comparison chart of the Top 10 Enterprise Social Tools.

Darlene Lin: Darlene is a web contributor, specializing in the CRM, Social, IT Management and ERP segments. She has several years of experience covering the software technology world, writing about the latest companies and trends and interviewing the founders of emerging and innovative technology companies.