Note: there is a new writer coming on board, which I will announce in a separate post on Saturday.

10 Classic Josh Posts

Below I've listed 10 of Josh's posts that I've particularly enjoyed over the past 15 months. This is a completely subjective list. I nearly called it 'Top 10 Josh Posts', as a kind of inside joke that I think he would appreciate :-)

• Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More -- Josh's first post on RWW, dated 6 June '07. I believe it was after reading this post, which Josh wrote as a guest writer, that I thought: "I need to hire this guy".
• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One -- Josh's second post! Crowdsourcing has been one of his favorite topics, see also IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D (more links to his crowdsourcing posts inside that).
• Rolling Your Own Online Office
• Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students
• Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Play; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Media; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Extension -- Josh has written a lot of outstanding posts about Facebook, and this 5-part series on top Facebook Apps is still a must-read.
• Is Facebook Worth the Hype?
• The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? -- online politics has been another strong topic for Josh, as this post demonstrates. I always looked forward to reading his take on how the Web was becoming a part of the political process.
• A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff -- still ranks as one of our most successful posts ever, proving once and for all that the Web loves lists.
• Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes -- a great overview of the Beacon saga at Facebook.
• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web -- 'nuff said!

All the best Josh in your future endeavours. Stay in touch and we hope to see you regularly in the RWW comments ;-)

Crowdsourcing

Maybe the most interesting aspect of ShovelWatch, however, is that it plans to engage citizen reporters to track how the stimulus money will be spent in their local communities. Essentially, the site plans to crowdsource the coverage of the stimulus plan.

Besides its focus on content from The Takeaway, ProPublica, and WNYC, ShovelWatch also tracks stories about the Stimulus Bill on other news sites and features a nice list of resources in its sidebar.

With Recovery.gov, the government has obviously created its own site for tracking the stimulus bill, but Recovery.gov doesn't currently feature as much in-depth information as ShovelWatch (the 'announcements on the site haven't been updated since the middle of last week) and its focus is more on providing a high-level overview and not on tracking local developments.

Last week's update to Google Maps introduced new ways to report errors for Google Maps users, so Google is clearly thinking about using a crowdsourcing approach to mapping for Google Maps. Google also announced that it now includes data from a number of US government organizations like the Forest Service and the US Geological Survey in its maps.

In the US, the Census Bureau creates a fairly accurate base map, and this data is available freely and represents the core data set for the OpenStreetMap project. With Map Maker, Google also offers an easy-to-use mapping product that even non-geographers can use to create and edit maps and which Google has already employed to let its users create maps for countries where no accurate maps existed until now.

While the new maps that were launched last week also include new errors, the overall detail of the maps has clearly increased and now even includes data for the boundaries of land parcels in some municipalities.

Why?

The question, of course, is why Google plans to make its own maps now. For one, chances are that Google is currently paying Tele Atlas a lot of money for using its maps. Mapping services are notoriously protective of how their data can be used, which is one of the reasons Apple can't offer turn-by-turn directions in the built-in mapping application on the iPhone, for example. Google probably wants to be free to do whatever it wants with its maps without having to worry about licensing issues.

By providing its own maps and an API for others to use these maps, Google could potentially become a major competitor to Tele Atlas and Navteq now, and if Google continues to make these maps easily available to developers without cumbersome licensing restrictions, it could bring radical change to the mapping business.

"Advertisers from all over the world will drop their briefs at holotof and we will sent them our ideas in return. They will choose a winner, who will get the cash award."

Of course, dropping your briefs is liable to get you in trouble some places... but in Holotof it is a chance to get creative people competing for your business. I like the idea and it seems a good way for advertising creatives to get work - especially for young or inexperienced creatives, who are trying to build a reputation in their industry.

Holotof is very similar to the current wave of jobs websites, such as oDesk - which R/WW mentioned in our review of the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad. oDesk describes itself as an "on demand global workforce" and the idea is to be a marketplace for technical talent - as with Holotof, individuals essentially compete to land a contracting job. oDesk also provides web-based tools to manage remote teams, which has been a little controversial because it includes monitoring and click tracking software. Incidentally the controversy has been neatly turned into a positive by oDesk, even to the point of oDesk users waxing poetic about it:

"Each 20 minutes, a screenshot appears,
of the desktop for the guy I just hired.
At the end of my day, I can view on a page,
the events of his day that transpired.

But oDesk knows that there’s more to manage,
and throws some treats in the mix,
a vertical bar beside the photo,
counting all his mouse clicks!"

But I would imagine Holotof doesn't need to go to those lengths, as advertising creativity is not really a thing you can measure by mouse clicks!!

Anyway, Holotof guarantees its clients get at least 10 bids/ideas for their advertising briefs. Their business model is that clients pay for usage of the system - rather than a set monthly fee or a commission.

It's unclear at this stage how much business has flowed through Holotof, but I think the idea itself is promising and we'll increasingly see this kind of use of web technology in the global workforce. Speaking as a New Zealander, I can see huge benefits to both kiwi workers and businesses in using such a system to get work outside our tiny country.

Update: We just heard back from Google - here is the official statement about which phones will be able to contribute traffic data to Google Maps:

Google Maps products that include location services will make use of this information for traffic. This includes the downloadable Google Maps for Mobile product for mobile phones as well as the Google Maps application for Android phones. One exception is the maps functionality that Google provides for the iPhone - the iPhone does not provide any location data that is used for traffic crowdsourcing at this time.

Google is obviously aware of the potential privacy issues involved here, but according to Dave Barth, the product manager for Google Maps, Google will "find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it." This way, nobody can find out where a car actually came from.

According to Google, enough users use these phones to make this project feasible. In my experience however, the data for these arterial roads isn't quite as trustworthy as the data for highways.

Overall, though, this is a great project and the more users are aware of it, the better the data will become. However, it is also worth noting that some GPS manufacturers have been using data from their users' GPS systems to crowdsource traffic data for years, though chances are that Google will be able to recruit more users and hence create a better experience for its users.

Read/WriteWeb's other writers will also be contributing, so you shouldn't notice much difference - although it will probably be lighter posting this week than usual.

So without further ado, I am off to enjoy a one week break from blogging and online life in general! If you are thinking of emailing me during this time, don't expect a response ;-) I will be back at the Editor's desk from Monday 30 April, when Microsoft MIX in Las Vegas kicks off. I will be covering that event live, so see you then!

Kaufman got the idea after the Bevy, one of Mophie's most popular products, was designed by the crowd at Macworld using sketch pads and a precursor to the system that evolved into Kluster. The keychain/bottler opener/iPod shuffle case was one of Mophie's best selling products, and it was designed in just 72 hours by a crowd, and launched as a product just 2 months later. Kaufman realized he was potentially onto something.

The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or "phase"), people submit what are called "sparks." Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit "amps" -- which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign "watts" to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.

Then an algorithm that takes into account "each user's successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history" goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).

The whole concept is similar to the one behind Derek Powazek's new site, Pixish (our coverage). The main difference is that where Pixish is strictly for design related tasks, Kluster is for anything suited to crowd creation. And at Kluster, the crowd is also being relied upon to pick the best result.

During the TED conference, Kluster is hoping to use their system to create a new product in 72 hours. It will be unveiled on the last day of the conference, March 1 at 8am. Unfortunately, the Kluster site has been having a lot of problems, so getting in to participate might be easier said than done. There are $15,000 in phase prizes up for grabs.

Can lightning strike twice? Or was the Bevy a fluke? Kaufman admitted earlier this month that right now most companies see participation in Kluster as a means of viral marketing to connect with their die hard fans. It will take a few hit products to come out of the Kluster process to prove that it is a viable way for companies to conduct their R&D. Do you think it will work? Let us know in the comments below.

The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.

Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

It's dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision -- and yet we think there's room for one more: Hunch.

She adds that a lot of content in Hunch is going to be generated by its user base. Do you know the right questions to ask to help someone pick out the right pair of shoes for hiking, or what cell phone to buy? With Hunch, you will be able to get in on the ground floor and know that your contributions will help many people get the right answer to their question.

While we know very little about the inner workings of Hunch, it apparently combines decision trees with a fair amount of end user personalization in the form of questions it asks people visiting the site. These questions allow Hunch to form affinities with other users who ask similar questions. On the back end, contributors will be able to create topic areas (called Super Questions) and add questions and results underneath those topics. How much control you will have or how the interface looks for this we aren't sure yet.

Caterina also says that there is room for the site to make money, by including Super Question areas that are affiliated with commercial products or services, but that part is not being rushed as they want to get the core functionality working just right.

We think the potential for the idea behind Hunch is huge. If you look at another very famous crowdsourced project, Wikipedia, and combine that with the sheer utility of the application Aardvark (which lets you pose questions to an extensive network of Aardvark-managed instant messaging contacts; our review here), the sky really is the limit for how much this tool can grow in usefulness and popularity.

Self-titled photo courtesy of Caterina Fake on Flickr.

His post, entitled Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites opened with this plea:

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

Rep. Honda cites several ongoing efforts in this regard, such as Tim O'Reilly's original request (which made a headline on Slashdot) as well as his prior legislation on allowing more access to legislative databases. He sees this as steps toward getting to the concept of government 2.0, where technology plays a greater role in allowing collaboration between congress members and the public.

This is an open call for your thoughts and suggestions on the legislative databases that should be made accessible, as well as how that data could be used to drive innovative approaches on policy and 'shape the future of the nation'. There are a number of ways you can participate in this open call: you can submit ideas via this surveymonkey link, use the #honda2.0 and #opengov hashtags in your tweets, and, of course, leave a comment on the original article.

We did a quick search of tweets related to Rep. Honda's post and found a couple: One pointed to the Sunlight Foundation, co-founded by Ellen Miller (@ellnmllr), a site dedicated to open government accountability, and the League of Technical Voters, a site created and maintained by Silona Bonewald (@silona), which is geared toward technical efforts to improve lawmaking and governmental processes. We hope that with congress members such as Rep. Honda and others coming on board, this effort can really pick up steam and end up creating a more transparent and responsive government in the future.

Uncle Sam image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Rep. Honda image courtesy of O'Reilly Radar's Mike Honda profile page.

Graphic Design

One of the most well-developed areas of crowdsourcing services on the Internet is graphic design. Generally, these sites exist in the form of graphic design contest web sites where clients put up a call for submissions for a piece of graphic design work, and designers compete for a cash prize by submitting designs.

crowdSPRING is the latest entry into the increasingly crowded crowdsourced graphic design service market. The service officially launches today, after a $5000 design competition it held over the winter to design the crowdSPRING site itself -- a wise move because it shows that the founders are willing to "eat their own dogfood" and also attracted an initial set of designers to the site.

crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries. crowdSPRING charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.

99designs is very likely the largest graphic design contest site on the web. From its humble beginnings as an area on the web development discussion forums at SitePoint, to being spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace a few months ago, 99designs has experienced astonishing growth to become a leader in its market. The site now has 18,000 registered users -- 11,000 are designers -- with 150 being added each day. $10,000 worth of prize money is put up for grabs on the site daily and it serves 5 million page views per month.

SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle tells me that many designers use the site for lead generation, and that often, winning designers find that contest holders will turn into long term clients who forgo the crowdsourcing option on future projects to work directly with a designer whose work they know they like.

GFXContests is a forum-based design contest site founded two years ago that seems to attract mostly logo design jobs. Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of GFXContests, and sold the site earlier this year. I am no longer involved with it. An interesting note: the site's logo was designed via a design contest held on the SitePoint Contests service (now 99designs).

DesignOutpost is one of the oldest design contest services, sometimes credited with originating the idea -- though that's up for debate. The site is forum-based and relies on a "design team" (pre-approved designers) to fill out its crowd.

Designcontest.net is another large, forum-based design contest site that also relies on the pre-approved "design team" concept.

Pixish (our coverage) is a design and photography contest marketplace launched in February by well-known designer Derek Powazek. Unlike many of the design contest services in this round up, prizes on Pixish aren't always cash.

Others

A number of large web development discussion communities host contest areas, including NamePros, v7 Network, and Webmaster Talk. Meanwhile, Grapic Competitions is a directory of individual graphic design competitions (not affiliated with the above sites), many that offer cash prizes.

Programming

Top Coder uses a competition approach to leverage is distributed network of over 50,000 developers to create software for its enterprise clients.

The software development community -- especially the open source community -- has long used "bounties" to help lure developers to certain tasks. microPledge (our coverage) is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer). In essence, that means people can give the crowd an incentive to work on a software development project.

Like microPledge, Cofundos.org (our coverage) is a web service for offering and managing software bounties. Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. Expanding beyond software development (to say, event funding) is something that microPledge has also hinted at pursuing.

Customer Support

Fixya is a question and answer community, in which people ask and answer technical support queries. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers for tech support. Uniquely, though, Fixya has partnered with some companies to provide an official channel for crowdsourced tech support. Most recently, the site launched a co-branded version of their service for Best Buy.

The goal of Get Satisfaction (recent coverage) isn't really to crowdsource customer service, so much as to make it easier for people to get access to companies they have an issue with. However, people do provide one another with help on the site -- similar to at Fixya -- and companies can use it to monitor customer support issues to more quickly tell if an issue isn't just an isolated incident.

Research & Development

IdeaScale (our coverage) does for research and development what Get Satisfaction does for customer service by providing Digg-style feature request boards. Companies are able to tap the "wisdom of the crowds" to learn what their customers want from their product or service.

featurelist.org is very similar to IdeaScale, but more public, not branded, and focused on software.

FeVote is another suggestion board web application that lets companies crowdsource their research and development. Like Get Satisfaction, FeVote aims to put the control in the hands of the users by encouraging them to make suggestion boards for their favorite companies.

CollabAndRate is "organic collaboration" software that enables companies to poll their customers, employees, or partners for new ideas. Essentially, this is the same idea as the three sites mentioned above, but with a slightly different pitch.

Whatever You Can Imagine

Amazon's Mecahnical Turk service (recent coverage) is what the company refers to as an "on-demand workforce." In reality, Mechanical Turk is a 100,000 strong member crowd that people can call on to complete a wide variety of tasks. See the 10,000 Cents art project as example of how one can leverage Amazon's crowdsourcing service.

Note: for a full round-up of the day's action at TC40, check out Allen Stern's sterling effort at Center Networks.

Cake Financial

Cake Financial is a financial sharing platform backed by Ron Conway. It allows people to share portfolios and real time transactions with others. The site can be integrated with services such as E*Trade and Charles Schwab. This sharing feature allows you to chart yourself against other people and the market normals. You see what your friends are doing, you get notified in real time, and so on. So it's financials, enriched with social networking features.

My question: isn't this private information that you'd rather keep to yourself. Plus this may result in gaming and legal problems. However, since this business deals directly with money, it can create real addiction among its users and virally spread. So it may be a great success.

DocStoc

DocStoc is the "YouTube of documents." It allows you to share professional documents via a widely accepted and embeddable Flash interface. It offers basic features like categories and search. As a result, you can search for "venture capital companies in california" and you get the documents you want - full of contact info. Special ranking algorithms are based on user trustability. You can set documents to be private or public, and set whatever license you want. The site also includes other social networking elements, such as messaging and comments.

TeachThePeople

TeachThePeople's goal is to be the "ebay for education" [Ed: what was Bernard saying about Concept Extrapolation yesterday? ;-) ]. You can create classes on topics you are an expert at, then teach them and earn revenues. The example that the founders gave was:

Say you are Mark Andreessen, you are a great entrepreneur who has built many big companies and successfully exited - in that case, many people would like to learn from you, know your secret. By creating a "university" on this network, you share your knowledge and earn revenues. You can also set up a management team, assign assistants (in this instance, Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington).

The site gives every teacher 5GB of storage space. It has advanced features such as discussion boards, Q&A, live chat, etc. It really seems to be a great platform for this purpose. The company says Y! Groups and others are great for communicating, but they can't specialize on topics such as guitar courses, Salesforce teachings etc. They say: you must be good at something, so why not monetize it.

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is an electronic products crowdsourcing site from France. You post an idea, people vote; if your product gets many votes, it goes to a marketplace where "fans" and "partners" may join you in purchasing and/or selling.

For me, this was the weakest idea of the event so far. Why would anyone want to share their ideas with an untrusted community, when the idea is not defendable?

Ponoko

So far in computing history we've had the personal pc, personal printing - now we get personal manufacturing. Personal manufacturing actually started with the likes of CafePress, but Ponoko takes it one step further. It allows you to make toys from .eps formatted Adobe Illustrator files. I don't think the public can easily get started with this advanced program, but the company claims it is easy.

How it works: you set up material type, color, and so on; then your product gets manufactured and shipped to you. You can even sell it in a marketplace and earn money.

The idea is good, but the market may be small and it will probably be way too hard for the average user to get started with it.

Edited by Richard MacManus

Crowdsourcing translations is a natural fit for a social network. At the same time, though, it does come with some pitfalls, including a higher chance of inconsistencies and sub-par translations.

For a site like hi5, which has seen most of its growth outside of the U.S., being able to provide its users with a localized version is simply a smart business move. Facebook, after all, lost a lot of its potential market share to clones in some countries because it did not offer localized versions of its service.

Top Web News

Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost Per Action) online advertising service. Our take is here, in which we posed the question: will Microsoft and Yahoo have to buy their way into the CPA game? This generated some interesting comments. Adam noted:

"Google's key advantage with CPA could be the integration with Google Checkout. If Checkout takes off, then Yahoo's in trouble with trying to catch up on CPA because it can't just buy into the race and be as effective as Goog."

SEO Mash wrote:

"CPC will still be king and there is no need for Yahoo or MSN to be that worried. CPA/PPA only make sense when there is a well defined "purchase" action that can be directly related back to the original click-thru and for many/most Adwords advertisers that is not the case."

"....an interesting post would be to examine why the hell Microsoft and Yahoo are so slow to take the initiative on this, and everything else that Google has won on in the past few years."

The second big news of the week was the News Corp/NBC Online Video Deal, in which News Corporation and NBC Universal partnered with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! - in an attempt to compete with Google/YouTube. 

In other bigco news, Adobe launched Apollo, Alpha Version this week and Yahoo launched oneSearch to the US Mobile Web. The latter essentially means that Yahoo's new mobile search service is now available to millions more people. In our post, we had an interview with Yahoo's Director of Mobile Web Lee Ott and explored what the news means exactly.

Analysis Posts

Once again we had some outstanding (if we do say so ourselves) analysis posts this week, with our writers going super-in-depth into the latest Web trends and products.

Alex Iskold wrote two excellent posts: Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services and Current Mashup and API Trends. The first one was notable for almost causing a Web 2.0 crisis of confidence! Well, it at least proved some inspiration for Peter Rip's controversial post this week entitled Web 2.0 - Over and Out and Valleywag's follow-up post. Both cited Alex's "Web 3.0" post as evidence that the tide is turning. In any case, our post is well worth reading for anyone interested in what's next in the Web's evolution. FWIW, we only used the term 'web 3.0' to signify something between what has come to be known as 'web 2.0' and the Semantic Web. 

Josh Catone wrote a comprehensive overview of the growing crowdsourcing market. And to emphasize the point, there is some excellent "crowdsourcing" going on in the comments - where many people listed other crowdsourcing projects worth checking out.

There were two great posts this week on the topic of building and marketing your startup. Check out Jitendra Gupta's How to Build a Profitable Startup by Knowing Your Users Better and then Emre Sokullu's How To Market Your Web App.

Sramana Mitra's latest post analyzed MSN Money, concluding that it is a stronger offering than Yahoo Personal Finance.

Finally, for those of you interested in the enterprise space, check out CIOs Spurn Web 2.0 Startups - Enterprises Want Suites and Large, Incumbent Software Vendors.

Startup Action

We profiled the following startups this week:

• Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies
• Dekoh Challenges Apollo As Desktop/Web Platform
• Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App
• P2P Lender Zopa Gets $13M Funding - Expands into US
• Userplane Releases Userlist - IM for Websites a Trend to Watch

Poll

Our poll this week asked Which Personalized Homepage Do You Use?. It was a hot topic, as at the start of the week Netvibes launched its "Coriander Edition" and later in the week Google launched new themes. Here are the final results of the poll:

Google Personalized Homepage          27% (409 votes)
Pageflakes                                        27% (397 votes)
Netvibes                                           22% (326 votes)
I don't use a personalized homepage  12% (174 votes)
My Yahoo                                         5% (76 votes)
Yourminis                                         2% (36 votes)
Live.com                                          2% (31 votes)
Webwag                                          0% (7 votes)
Other (please note in comments)       2% (34 votes)

There was a late flurry of votes for Pageflakes, bringing it to second place just behind Google Personalized Homepage. Netvibes was also very popular. Those 3 'start pages' have a clear lead in innovation and are favorites of the web 2.0-savvy crowd.

While it was perhaps to be expected that market leader My Yahoo isn't well used by Read/WriteWeb's early adopter readership (although now that My Yahoo is innovating again, that may begin to change), it did surprise me that Microsoft's live.com rated so poorly. Only 31 out of nearly 1,500 poll respondents said that live.com is their favorite personalized homepage, perhaps reflecting the confused branding of live.com and its barebones look n' feel. However it does actually have some nifty gadgets, so I was a little surprised it only got 2% of votes. It also seems that relative newcomer Webwag is struggling to make an impression.

The other noteworthy piece of data was that 12% of respondents don't use a personalized homepage at all, which suggests the market is still growing.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

"At Google, we know we've got some really great users with some really great ideas, and we're excited to open up a new project called Product Ideas, a platform through which we're taking a new approach to feedback for Google mobile products. Whether it's a feature request, a crazy idea, a rave or a rant, we want to hear it. Even more, we want other users to hear it, to see what others are buzzing about, and to be able to vote on all these ideas."

But the FAQs indicate that this may just be the beginning of the conversation:

"We love that you have thoughts about our other products! Currently, we're in the process of rolling out Product Ideas pages for other Google Products, so stay tuned more information."

To join the Google R&D team - or to propose some ideas and vote on others - simply visit Google Product Ideas and log in with your Google credentials. After declaring a nickname and indicating where you're from, you'll be part of the team deciding where Google Mobile development goes in 2009.

Who knows? Your idea could inspire the next feature that Google mobile picks to pursue.

ReadWriteWeb first wrote about Google Product Ideas in late 2008. At the time the site was focused on collecting mobile ideas. Today Google is offering users a chance to submit on a variety of products. Within each sub-site users can view the top voted suggestions, the most popular concepts, the newest submissions and the ideas that have been "answered" or acted upon. While Google Reader's Answered Ideas page is currently blank, it will be interesting to track what the team chooses to work on and why.

To submit your product ideas visit the main Product Ideas page.