A startup company called ledface is working on their new web service that will turn each registered user into a node within collectively intelligent network. After acquiring the membership, users can start asking their questions and collective intelligence is supposed to answer them.

As I understood from their website, it works like this:

• you post the question
• ledface starts googling through all of its users, looking for people who are best fit to give an answer
• chosen ones form a small team to solve the question in a collaborative manner

That makes it different from current Q&A websites, where answers compete with each other to become the best one. Plus, on the Q&A services we have now, you can only hope that your question will get noticed by an expert, but ledface will take care of finding the right people.

There are no user rank and all people are anonymized, so why would you want to answer any questions here at all??? I assume that by answering, you’ll get your own questions better promoted so you can get better answers:

“one of the rewards Ledface offers is that the more you contribute, the more you “unlock” percentages of the collective brain. You’ll reach 100% only if you really get involved”

Behind ledface there is a vision of creating if not global brain, but at least collaborative environment, where people can help each other without having to think, think, think all the time about their reputation.

Personally, I’m rather skeptical because of all that blah blah on collective intelligence etc. on their blog. Any social network or Wikipedia that are numerous today can be called collective intelligence, in that sense, but only ledface seems to be riding these visions in order to promote themselves. But let’s see how it goes. Really, if they make this Q&A service work in realtime, so that anyone can think on the question together with collective mind, that may become a pre-alpha version of the emerging global brain.

Link to the official ledface website