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Today google launched Google Moderator. The service allows people to suggest questions during tech talks, and the community can up or down vote the proposed questions to determine which are asked of the guest. Here’s a screenshot from Matt Cutts’ blog:

Google Moderator was an internal tool that they’ve now released to the masses. From Matt’s Blog:

My team uses it often at Google, e.g. it’s great for prioritizing which questions are most important.

I like that Google is in many ways turning itself inside out by taking many of our internal tools and making them available to the world. We use tools such as Gmail and Google Docs all the time in-house to share information, presentations, and docs. Guido van Rossum recently announced that a version of Mondrian, our internal code review tool, is available for the outside world to use. Now Google Moderator is another tool that anyone can use. Projects such as Google Code and Google App Engine make it even easier to share code or applications with the world. And releasing low-level tools such as protocol buffers or high-level tools such as Google Web Toolkit makes life easier for lots of developers.

Google is not the only company that does this, of course. Yahoo for example has their excellent Yahoo User Interface Library, Yahoo Pipes, or YSlow. Its just nice when companies release code or tools that benefit lots of people on the web.

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