Google Announces Digg For Questions
Google released an internal tool for voting questions up or down that works a lot like Digg Dialogg. The new service, Google Moderator, was rewritten to run on App Engine.
Moderator is broken into series containing topics. The topics have lists of questions that users can contribute to and vote on. Google uses this service in-house during tech talks and all staff meetings to determine which questions the audience is most interested in. I expect this will start getting use at web conferences, where a sea of laptoperati is standard.
As a programmer, I’d love to see the code for Moderator released to the App Engine community. As evidenced by the App Engine Cookbook, Google wants to help developers create on its platform. The application is simple enough that beginners to the platform could get a good feel for how everything works. Moderator is also complex enough that it would show a good real world example.
I’ve asked Moderator creator Taliver Heath about releasing the code. To do this, I added my question to his Moderator section of “Ask a Google engineer.” Doing so highlighted one drawback to the service. Since it was built for live events, there is no way for me to ever get the answer to my question.
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