Rich Barton has been in an innovative mood recently. In addition to running the Seattle online real estate company Zillow.com and serving as a venture partner at Benchmark Capital, Barton also turned up a couple months ago as a a director at the stealthy online travel startup NewTravelco.

Now, the former Expedia chief executive is kicking off a new project called Pozit. At this point, Barton says Pozit is a "total science experiment" that he and his brother-in-law built for fun over the past few months after they came up with the idea at Thanksgiving dinner. Barton describes the service as a "nifty little tool for invite-only discussions."

Pozit is attempting to create a secure place online where groups of people can discuss travel, books, cooking or other topics.

"Like a small dinner party, intimate discussions can be deeper and more fun than wider forums, and can generate ideas and recommendations that are more personally relevant and useful," the company writes on its Web site. "Current tools like email, Facebook, and Twitter have real shortcomings for engaging specific groups over time, and they lack a simple way to organize, archive, and access the nuggets of wisdom we create when we bring the right people together."

A number of services are already attacking the concept of private discussion groups. Those include services on Facebook, Yahoo and Google, as well as new offerings from startups like Seattle's GroupieGuide. Google's recent acquisition of Aardvark -- a service which allows users to ask questions and then receive answers from friends -- also is a player in the space as is the search giant's recently introduced Buzz product

Jay Karas, left, with Rich Barton

But Barton's brother-in-law Jay Karas, who has led the development of the project out of Boston where he runs another startup called CarbonRally, said that Pozit is easier to manage. "Anyone in five minutes can set up a space, and get in the space," he said.

The service was inspired in part by Bit.ly since it creates a short link around every discussion topic which can be shared amongst collaborators. The link is publicly available, though those who have not been invited to the discussion are unable to add to it or see the profile pictures of contributors.

At this point, Karas said they've yet to start thinking about a business model. That's part of the reason why they're dubbing Pozit nothing more than a "science experiment."

But there are real scenarios where consumers might enjoy having a private, invite only discussion among friends. Barton said he and Karas have been using the service to discuss family travel plans, noting that there could be some interesting ways to integrate Pozit with NewTravelco's stealthy travel service.

A number of companies have tried to corner the market on travel discussion, most notably the Expedia-owned property of TripAdvisor which attracts more than 46 million visitors per month to its travel review and discussion board service.

In fact, many of the examples that Pozit provides on its Web site are directly tied to travel. Those include discussions created around ski trips to Whistler, European getaways to Spain and family vacations to Sea World. But there's one big difference between TripAdvisor and Pozit. TripAdvisor is a discussion forum for the masses, while Pozit encourages dialogue among small groups.

And that's where Pozit thinks there's a little bit of wiggle room.

"We think recommendations from friends are way more interesting than what everyone says," Barton says.