Hey googlebot, when you read this, pass it on to google labs, but don't forget to give me some stock first. Way back in the day, I mentioned an app idea for a system that would let people ask a question, then send that question off to other users of the system who would then answer it. Well, rumour around the ol' internet these days has it that Google is working on an IM client based on the Jabber protocol.
Imagine if you will this: in your GIM buddy list (forgive me, I've never used Jabber, so I'm not sure what the correct terminology is) you have a built in buddy named "Ask Google" or something similar. Whenever you IM a question to Ask Google the question is then forwarded to other GIM users (only those who have elected to receive questions, and probably only to a random sampling of that subset). Some number of them respond back to Ask Google with an answer. The answers are correllated into similar replies, and the top n answers are then sent back to the original submitter. The submitter can then further rank the validness of the replies which can be used to rank the quality of the answers from the different users who replied. A user's "quality ranking" can then be used in the future to weight his/her replies when correlating answers. Someone whose answers are often ranked as high quality will be more likely to have their answers sent back to the submitter.
Additionally, Google can utilize the FOAF data it undoubtedly has waiting in the wings (from Orkut and the GMail invite trail) to send questions to a targetted audience. Answers from people within, say, two or three degrees can automatically be sent back to the submitter, or at least given a higher quality ranking. There can also be a method to select a broad category for a question when asking it, let users specify categories for which they're willing to answer questions (Ask me about: Programming:Web, Programming:C#, Music:Indie, Music:Experimental) and only send questions to people willing to answer questions on that topic.
As far as incentives to actually answer questions, I don't think you need many, especially if it's Google providing the system. There are plenty of people out there that would do it just to be able to say, "Hey, my answers are ranked in the top 1% of all questions asked for Comics:Marvel!" If for some reason that's not enough, the system could also assign points to users whose replies are highly ranked and those points could be used for...something. Google tshirts, freedom from ad-sense links for a month, who knows.
To take it even further, if a question goes unanswered, Ask Google can reply back to the original submitter suggesting he/she take his question to Google Answers. The idea would be that quick questions that you're having trouble finding an answer for yourself can go to GIM->Ask Google, more complicated questions that require actual research should go to Google Answers.
Damn that would be cool, and frankly the more I think about it, the more surprised I'd be if Google didn't have something like this in the works already.
Posted by joshua at August 30, 2004 08:33 AM