A voicethread is...

..a place to foster, capture, and then share the group conversations that surround evocative shared media. A mouthful but all true. People have always talked and shared the ideas inspired by evocative media, we all do it all the time, day in and day out, online and off. But there's never been a particularly human interface for it on the web. Normal human conversations are overflowing with metadata, like who the speaker is, and all the known details of their history, and we humans are astute readers of and sponges for this information. But in order to reformat conversations for the web, we've stuck some dynamite in the middle of them, blown them up, picked up the various pieces, labeled them, and then reassembled them to try to recapture something of the original soul of a human conversation. It's a bit like trying to recapture the experience of flight by re-assembling 98% of a crashed airplane's parts, you can get the basic shape right, but the feeling your looking for will be elusive. So instead of trying to capture group conversations by re-assembling as many 'parts' as possible, we're going to take a stab at doing the opposite, strip as much as possible away. We're hoping that making a paper airplane and tossing it out a window will better capture the wonder of flight, than gazing at an exploded-diagram of an airplanes parts.
While Voicethread is in many ways a beta product with so many cool features coming round the corner, we're releasing now because it's core is intact and robust and we need to learn more about our users experience. So please go and fill the empty gray vessels that are voicethreads, use them in ways we haven't been able to imagine, and then give us your best curmudgeonly feedback.(nice feedback is good, it makes us feel nice, but critical curmudgeonly feedback makes us better, maybe you could do both?)
Thanks for you interest -Steve Muth