Dani Ryan, CrowdChat CTO and Co-Founder joins John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE for their ongoing coverage of the 2014 Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California. CrowdChat is a new platform to host #hashtag chats across multiple social networks. CrowdChat not only provides users a new way to communicate with each other, but web analytics and custom social-analytics for Twitter including reach and impact. In theCUBE, Ryan, Furrier and Vellante discuss the competitive advantage, innovation and future for CrowdChat.

To illustrate CrowdChat’s functionality, Ryan explains an upcoming discussion on the platform. Brian Gallagher, president of EMC’s largest division will be available via CrowdChat at 11am pacific time tomorrow. Using the #hashtag, #AskBrianG, participants can ask Gallagher questions and have all updates will go to their social network of choice. Users will appreciate the ability to discuss and share on social media without spamming their timelines. While leading social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are more geared towards communicating with people you already know, Ryan suggests CrowdChat breaks down the social media silos, facilitating communication with new like-minded individuals.

“Forums haven’t been reinvented since the 1990s,” says Ryan. CrowdChat re-invents the forum by combining it with the best of social media applications and data insight. CrowdChat is similar to Tweetchat in that it allows all updates to be sent to Twitter with a given #hashtag. CrowdChat goes further still, as it back-links with Twitter cards and preserves the Question-Answer format of the session. CrowdChat’s voting component allows the most interesting content to rise to the top, even after the session. As with Storify, the discussions can later be shared anywhere.