Business

BERMONDSEY GIRL FOLLOWS IN GOOGLE'S FOOTSTEPS

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26 May 2010

Kevin Quinn
news@southwarknews.org

Following in the footsteps of the founders of Google and Facebook, Bermondsey-based Barbara Nowacka is determined to revolutionize the world from her bedroom.

For over a year she's been working on a new web application, yoomoot.com, which makes online discussions radically more productive and useful. She and co-founder Nicolas Holzapfel became obsessed with solving the messiness of online comments and forums after meeting as students at Southwark's London College of Communication. yoomoot.com was launched earlier this month after having been in invite-only private beta for several months.

She told the 'News': "The internet has revolutionized communication, but it could do better. The big problem is that the web still can't handle hundreds of people coming together and having a discussion. We're still relying on old metaphors and old ways of communicating. Consider the comments you see below a popular news article: it's not a conversation, it's a cacophony. High-quality comments get submerged, the same topics endlessly repeat themselves and hardly anyone bothers to read what's already been written."

Barbara says yoomoot offers a new way of having an online discussion which solves those poblems with three key features. Firstly permitted participants can edit each other's posts, encouraging the improvement of existing posts rather than creating unnecessary new posts.

Secondly every post has a summarized version, so that you can quickly scan over the summarized version of a whole conversation. And finally every reply has to be worded as a question and answer.

So instead of an overwhelming mass of undifferentiated comments, everything is neatly organised according to the specific question it addresses. Barbara added: "Wording thoughts as questions and answers forces us to think carefully about the point of what we're saying, encouraging structured, goal-focused thinking."

But the pair are eager to point out that this is not just another Q&A site. Barabara said: "These sites are not designed for long, complex conversations. yoomoot's unique interface is based around nested hierarchies of Q&A, allowing massive conversations to be entirely structured as Q&A. In contrast, all existing Q&A sites are based around a single Q&A accompanied by standard comment threads."

At first, the pair plan to run yoomoot as a standalone site supported by advertising and paid-for premium accounts. These accounts will remove advertising and give users greater control over their profile. Further down the line they want to release yoomoot as  a subscription service,  which provides organisations with their own private version of yoomoot to use for more effective knowledge-sharing, before developing a plugin which will allows blogs and other websites to use yoomoot to handle their comments, charging very high-traffic sites for the service.

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