Web-based startup is to launch their global brain for private testing in June
Posted on: 20/03/2011
- In: Projects
- 5 Comments
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.
5 Responses to "Web-based startup is to launch their global brain for private testing in June"
21/03/2011 at 7:33 PM
Thanks a lot for writing about Ledface Alexandra. 
You are right, every social network today says they use and provide collective intelligence. That’s why we talk about collective intelligence emergence.
Point is that CI’s emergence needs the right elements and current social networks have only some of them. Mix flour and milk and you will not have a cake. No matter how hard you try.
The “real time Q&A” is just our Minimum Viable Product. What we really want is to turn Ledface into a friend. Think it as someone that is always with you and that you can ask whenever you want and about any topic. It won’t be an oracle, just an intelligent and very well experimented pal at your fingertips.
21/03/2011 at 8:00 PM
“Think it as someone that is always with you and that you can ask whenever you want and about any topic.”
Sorry but I have Google.
We love Google. It works great for explicit knowledge. But try to get cultural knowledge, try to acquire a specific know-how. You will get it, but it will take a lot of time / effort…
Just a few examples that currently work badly with Google:
How do I take a photograph of a belly dance performance. As it’s on a stage, light keeps changing and of course the girl keeps moving. What’s the best way to shoot?
I’m a goalkeeper wannabe and I have an important match tomorrow. I saw on Weather.com that it will rain a lot so what kind of gloves can help me with the wet ball? Ah, I forgot to say that the ball will be much lighter in weight that the official FIFA ones.
I’m a salesperson selling tech books door-to-door. I’m wondering if I can use Foursquare to help me. Maybe I can integrate it to my Facebook or just make some “special nearby” to let people know when I’m around?
If you want, follow us in Twitter so we can send you an invite to our private beta in June, then you can test it…
22/03/2011 at 3:24 AM
Some of the hard parts are:
- how do you determine who is best qualified to answer. Even humans are not good at this.
- how do you determine the validity or likely validity of an answer? You can’t simply use how many people, fuzzily qualified or not, agree with it.
- what determines the priority of a question?
This last intersects a question from the above on what limits on “fuul access” really mean. If any user can ask a question to these limits apply to question priority, answerer selection or what exactly? Or do the limits only apply to what questions you get to answer? Or to other functionality of the site perhaps?
Alexandra Elbakyan
Brain-Computer Interfaces group at TheNeuroNetwork
1 | Crowdsourcing as Collective Intelligence | Bits Of Knowledge
20/03/2011 at 4:42 PM
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