Google to Crowdsource for New Ideas

Posted by jonathan at 9:46pm EST on 12/31/2008

Google was almost able to skip this into 2008 without anyone noticing, but a few of us did notice.

Google recently, as of December 2008, is crowdsourcing for new product ideas.

Product Ideas for Google Mobile launched on Google’s App Engine under the appspot.com domain name.

Here are some numbers at the time of writing this post. 1,485 people have submitted 488 ideas and cast 22,926 votes.

This is after 18 days having launched the new “listening platform.”

Is this because Google is losing the brains of the massive Google operation? Google lost Elliott Schrage this past May and Google lost its CFO a little over a year ago. Is Google losing all these brilliant team members and being forced to crowdsource…or is it just an outlet they are giving the common consumer to have a voice?

I asked an associate about his opinion on the new blogs and outlet for people to voice their opinions and he says it’s a good thing. That it will give Google more ideas and be able to help them expand faster.

Will we shortly see Microsoft and Yahoo! follow suit and open up their own “listening platform,” copying Google?

I have to give props to Yahoo! for being on Twitter though. That’s one thing they have done to be more “open” and available to the common consumer [you and me.]