Today I woke up and viewed my daily RSS Feed collection and read a post called, Collaboration, over at Jake Tracey’s site. The article talks about a new project that he has been spending a lot of time on. The project is called, Chalk. Chalk is what sounds to be an amazing Web-based application that you and your friends, family, team of designer or programmers, etc., can login and have a complete collaborative way of working. If you need to talk about a subject, talk about a design your working on, share your opinions, or whatever it may be, Chalk can do it, and in real-time.

Chalk is also getting worked on for adding a community system that will allow you to communicate with people you know, and also find people that you don’t know by sharing and bookmarking your Chalkboards.

We’re also going to lengths to provide users with simple ways to find new people to collaborate with via an extensive community system. Originally, you might prefer to work with people you know by contacting them with the simple private message and invite system. Later on, you can find new people to collaborate with by sharing and bookmarking Chalkboards - you name it, Chalk (probably) has it.

The primary focus of Chalk is its productivity, and from what I have read so far, sounds like it definitely will be. Especially with the use of the social features that are mentioned on the project page, “buddy lists, instant messaging and even entire community hub - all without a single page refresh and just a mouse click away.”

Chalk is possible by having Web 2.0 in mind. The use of AJAX and some nice Rails with Ruby get the job done and with compatibility. Great work on the project, can’t wait till its release.

By the way, when I signed up for the mailing list, it runs an animation sliding the bar down, then processing the address using AJAX. Yeah, that won my interest right there :)

View Chalk, Collaborative Productivity Environment.