So Google announced a whole bunch of new features today. There are also rumors about Google making a play for Aardvark, a just-in-time social Q&A service that I like and use. This post is not about Google, nor about Aardvark per se, but rather about networks in science, and real time information flow.
We ask questions in forums, in mailing lists, on Friendfeed; we search on Google, at NCBI; we track hashtags on Twitter. All of these questions and streams are flying by the web all the time, even in the sciences, but we have to go to various places to get access to them. What if I could sit at an interface and ask questions which land up in the right place, or allow me to track questions of interest being asked around the web and have those questions and their answers delivered to me? I wonder what such an interface would look like, and more importantly how it would be implemented. From the Q&A perspective I really like the Aardvark interface, which could be your IM client, a web page, Twitter, or your iPhone. But from the streaming and aggregation perspective, not so sure. Perhaps the Friendfeed technology repurposed, or added on to would be the way to go, or maybe it would be some of the new features Google has rolled out or those used by search engines like Collecta.
Will we ever be in a situation where we might be at our bench and need to look up something. Today we’d search. Tomorrow will we search, or will we ask, and the appropriate response would be delivered to you, whether it be a search query, or whether it be a response or two or three from people in the field. I like that possibility.
Questions and information streams
So Google announced a whole bunch of new features today. There are also rumors about Google making a play for Aardvark, a just-in-time social Q&A service that I like and use. This post is not about Google, nor about Aardvark per se, but rather about networks in science, and real time information flow.
We ask questions in forums, in mailing lists, on Friendfeed; we search on Google, at NCBI; we track hashtags on Twitter. All of these questions and streams are flying by the web all the time, even in the sciences, but we have to go to various places to get access to them. What if I could sit at an interface and ask questions which land up in the right place, or allow me to track questions of interest being asked around the web and have those questions and their answers delivered to me? I wonder what such an interface would look like, and more importantly how it would be implemented. From the Q&A perspective I really like the Aardvark interface, which could be your IM client, a web page, Twitter, or your iPhone. But from the streaming and aggregation perspective, not so sure. Perhaps the Friendfeed technology repurposed, or added on to would be the way to go, or maybe it would be some of the new features Google has rolled out or those used by search engines like Collecta.
Will we ever be in a situation where we might be at our bench and need to look up something. Today we’d search. Tomorrow will we search, or will we ask, and the appropriate response would be delivered to you, whether it be a search query, or whether it be a response or two or three from people in the field. I like that possibility.