Google Moderator launched this evening, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The idea is that there are always lots of good questions to ask in a limited period of time, but it’s hard to know which questions the attendees are most interested in hearing discussed. Moderator lets users add questions and vote on the questions of others, so the cream rises to the top.
Moderator was built by Taliver Heath as a side project and resides on Google App Engine. He describes the product on the Google App Engine blog:
I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner. The tool, which we internally called “Dory” after our favorite question-asking fish in Finding Nemo, quickly grew to other parts of Google including our weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for our series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.
cool
So does this guy get paid for the product google is now using?
As part of his 20% time, yes. Beyond that there’s no ads or anything, so I don’t know if you’re getting at him deserving a revenue share or something. Certainly creating something that winds up being very useful to the company can open doors that might take longer without his having written it.
Are you that guy?
No
Taliver used to teach CS 101 at Rutgers! hahaha…great to see him at GOOG now! I’m sure the freshman are breathing a sigh of relief!
I’m Taliver, and yes, I was paid my usual salary while working on this. So was Colby Ranger, who did the Lion’s share of the work on the code base. I, like any good developer, was able to take credit for the hard work of others.
I’m typically working on very low-level back-end platforms stuff, so it’s great to finally have an app normal people can use.
Hey Taliver. I have a few questions about how this could maybe be ported for people to participate remotely. Can you shoot me an email to discuss?
Very handy tool that we’ve been using for a while indeed (ggl dublin)… cool that it’s now on Apps!
@Mark: the article implies he made it while employed by Google.
awesome tools again from google.
hi, are there any similar web2.0 tools already there. given that this is a simple idea, there must be number of web2.0 sites already doing this. can you please list some from crunchbase.
But none of these has the name google behind.
I’m founder of http://www.yoosk.com, a crowd-sourcing Q and A platform. We launched in April 2007. Despite a number of attempts we failed to get listed on TechCrunch, despite the fact that we have crowd sourced questions from a number of senior UK government ministers and politicians. Earlier this year we were flattered to see askyourlawmaker.com and zotfish launch very similar sites.
That’s 3 to be getting on with.
Exciting tool indeed. Thanks techcrunch — this was kind of lost in the G1 coverage.
Our product — IdeaMagnet, shares some common ideas with this tool but is designed for enterprises who want open-ended conversations with their customers, partners or employees. The goal is to collect new ideas and use the crowd to filter, refine and prioritize ideas that matter to the enterprise.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss further. Our website will be updated soon, but I can provide more information in the mean time.
You can reach us at info@idea-magnet.com.
And another idea sharing/voting platform:
http://shareyourbrain.com
so google made it’s own internal digg and now is haring with us.
how long before they create a serious competitor to digg or mixx?
Good use of Google Apps Engine!
@idea-magnet what you are talking about is a social suggestion box and not a meeting moderator that google has launched. There are several products in the market which help organizations get closer to their customers, employees or partners…like salesforce ideas, latticepurple’s yousuggest, uservoice, crowdsound and bla bla bla…:) each having a target market and specific features.
And yes, the http://www.yousuggest.us one is a product from my stable http://www.latticepurple.com
Cheers:)
@idea-magnet what you are talking about is a social suggestion box and not about the meeting-moderator app that google has launched.
There are several products in the market which help organizations get closer to their customers, employees or partners…like salesforce ideas, latticepurple’s yousuggest, uservoice, crowdsound and bla bla bla…:) each having a target market and specific features.
And yes, the http://www.yousuggest.us one is a product from my stable http://www.latticepurple.com
Cheers:)
Good tool, I am all for it.
can’t wait to use the tool it sounds like it will be very useful.
Is there an API available for google moderator
Can this platform be licensed?
I’m the creator of TownHall (http://www.town-hall.net) which offers similar functionality to Google Moderator but with secure controlled access for internal business/enterprise use. It is still under development but I’m looking feedback to help make it into a great product. Please visit and try it out.