TechProsaic
I write about great software, Internet technology, cool gadgets, and The Next Big Thing.
Qunu part 2
I went ahead and added myself to Qunu and using the jabber service gave it a list of tags on which I consider myself an ‘expert’. Over the past few days I’ve had several invites popup in Psi. I accepted three so far today. The topics requested were Outlook, Firefox and XMPP. The experience was very good for me. I can only assume the user who asked the questions got something out of it because I don’t know if I can view my ratings yet.
As you can see below, its very straightforward. You are invited to a groupchat as if this were any other random chat you wanted to start.
BTW I have interviewed the three guys working on this project, I’ll be publishing that soon.
What we’re doing - Psi Forum
Check out some news on the Psi front: What we’re doing - Psi Forum
Also, I haven’t seen anything else about this, maybe they want it hush-hush. Oh well. As recently blogged by Justin Kirby, Qunu is an expert matching service. You’ve seen these before, Yahoo and Google and several smaller companies during the dotcom bubble tried their hand at it. The premise is to provide a place for people to ask questions, and then pay a modest amount for someone to come up with the answer. Its like IT consulting on a tiny scale. Of course, the subject could be anything, doesn’t have to be technology-related at all. Qunu takes this model but brings it into the instant world we live in today. So you ask a question, and through some magic on the back end, you are matched up with an expert in the subject–in live chat. How is this different from a livechat thing on hundreds of corporate websites already? The experts aren’t employees–they are you and me. Yes, the back end users Jabber. Duh. It would be pretty boring to me if it didn’t!
I don’t actually know many details at this point, but I plan on digging. You can try it yourself, too. Here’s a quote from Justin’s blog:
* Use the site at alpha.qunu.com. This is simply a custom jabber client via html and javascript.
* Register with quser.alpha.qunu.com
* Add quser.alpha.qunu.com to your roster via a subscribe request
* Add quser@qunu.com to your roster
/me goes to create a Qunu profile.
Pandora - Find New Music, Listen to Custom Internet Radio Stations
Pandora - Find New Music, Listen to Custom Internet Radio Stations
Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.
Sabifoo Jabber to RSS gateway
Sabifoo :: Instant Possibility
You can instantly create your own Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and post things to the Web just by sending a message with your present instant messaging account. Publishing your greetings to the world is as simple as saying “Hello!”
Sabifoo is essentially a bot that posts everything you say as an item in your very own RSS feed. It supports IM systems other than XMPP, but I’ll quietly pretend it doesn’t. 
I can see using this for a shoutbox on my blog…hmm…