News broke this morning that information giant Google was releasing a new system called Tip Jar, powered by the Google Moderator platform. Google’s Tip Jar seeks to provide financial advice to visitors, one small tip at a time. Each tip on the site is limited to 250 characters, and anyone with a Google account can log in to write their own tips.
Tip Jar uses the principles of social voting to determine which tips are the best. Whenever you are browsing through a category, you are presented with a random tip and asked whether it is good or not. The tips with the best voting records naturally rise to the top and are presented when you first visit the category. Tip Jar also scrolls through popular tips at the welcome page. The voting process automatically decides, through the collective wisdom of the site’s visitors, which tips are worthy of continuing to be shared, and which should fall by the wayside. Google’s blog this morning put it best:
“At Google, we put a lot of stock in both the wisdom of crowds — the idea that lots of people responding to a given question can collectively find the best answer — and the value of community. We believe that people working together can help one another through even the most difficult times.”
Tip Jar’s success is already evident as it rose in popularity today. As of 7:30 AM this morning, when I first discovered news about the new service, about 150 users were registered on the site. This evening, as of the writing of this post, already 1,345 users have registered for the service, and over 13,000 votes have been cast. Check it out for yourself.
Elsewhere today:
Photo by totalAldo
Fiscal Fizzle 
What an awesome little app! I just wonder if it will attract the sort of people who need the tips. There needs to be a balance between knowledgeable people writing and voting, and newbies reading and learning. It can’t be overrun by one group or another, or else it won’t work.