Grupthink, a company based in the heavenly Rocky Mountains between Glacier and Yellowstone Park, recently launched to provide an outlet for posting questions online in hopes that its user base can supply answers. This is not a new concept as Google Answers and Yahoo Answers both are similar products and Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) used to ask Jeeves, the now retired butler, for answers to your questions.
So how is Grupthink different from these competitors? A recent blog post by Grupthink helps shed some light on the differences between Grupthink and its competitors as it compared its product to a cocktail beverage as follows:
- 1/2 oz. Wiki
- 1/2 oz. Online polling
- 1/4 oz. Photo sharing
- 1/4 oz. Web 2.0 Buzzword Mix (ajax, social media, etc…)
- One (1) offensively large stalk of celery
I love the creativity and sense of humor! In taking some initial sips of the Grupthink cocktail I found the different parts of the drink product are seamlessly blended into a simple yet extremely intuitive interface aimed at Q & A. Users can vote on the relevance of the answers that are submitted. Syndication in the form of RSS is provided for every question topic. Additionally, tags are used to help find a question topic.
For more information check out the Grupthink development blog.
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http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2006/04/grupthink_for_y.html Always on the alert for the next groovy thing, I went and checked this out. Initial reaction: disappointment. The questions were sort of silly, of the Who is hotter, Betty or Veronica?&#... [Read More]
Tracked on Apr 27, 2006 12:37:37 PM
Not much out there yet- I put in a bunch of random words and didn't get any results for any of them:
"E-Mail"
"Supper"
"Dinner"
"asset"
"management"
nada-
Posted by: Tom | Thursday, April 27, 2006 at 09:51 AM
It just launched so it probably will take a little while to build up questions related to all of those fields.
Posted by: Frank Gruber | Thursday, April 27, 2006 at 11:15 AM
Thanks for the nice comments, Frank. We do have big ideas for Grupthink, and, as you said, we're in the building phase right now.
The objective for us right now is to foster compelling topics and attract more people. Although Grupthink is full of quite a few silly posts ( http://www.grupthink.com/poll/22 ) it can be a powerful consensus-builder for groups of people (more on this soon).
By the way, our next release is May 19th. Be sure to visit again.
Thanks!
Posted by: Steven Sundheim | Saturday, April 29, 2006 at 02:39 AM
I'd give grupthink another peek--it's a whole new beast with more content and features than you can shake a stick at now. One of the important missing keywords, "supper," now has results. But seriously: it's becoming an addictive place to hangout and exchange ideas.
Posted by: jody | Friday, July 14, 2006 at 09:20 PM