Just a few days ago, Google launched its newest Web application, "Google Moderator". The tool, which was initially developed to decide which questions to ask during the many talks given at its Mountain View headquarters, is peculiar in that it exports social bookmarking even to this domain, and has recently been released to the public for free.

The idea behind Moderator was initially conceived by Taliver Heath during the infamous "20% time" Google employees get every day to develop side projects, a policy that, while well reflecting the "work smart, not hard" philosophy of the company, has also proven extremely profitable in terms of the number of innovative product ideas that were generated thanks to this mechanism.

Heath describes the Moderator in these terms:

“I designed a tool that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked [...] The tool, which we internally called “Dory” after our favorite question-asking fish in Finding Nemo, quickly grew to other parts of Google including our weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for our series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.”

The project, which was just ported to the Google App Engine, tried to grab the attention of the media by entering "Ask a world leader" or "U.S. Presidential Debates 2008" as some of its featured sections, which, together with a
recent blog post by co-founder Sergey Brin regarding Google's position on California's Preposition 8, is just one more confirmation of the involvement of this company into the political world.

Seen the recent trend of many high-profile politicians in using the Web to its full potential as an effective mean of political campaigning, it would not be unlikely to see some of the questions featured on Google Moderator being answered in the months to come: Google, on the other hand, is not new to hosting talks of Presidential candidates in its Mountain View base, the latest being Senator Barack Obama back in November 2007.

But, as the same creator pointed out, Moderator was initially intended for tech talks, and politics is certainly not the only domain this simple yet powerful tool applies to. In the Moderator homepage, you can see featured topics include things such as "Suggest an Android Application" and "Ask a Google engineer".

The application is hosted at AppSpot.com, a publicly available service that lets Web developers run their application on Google servers benefiting from a fully integrated development environment. AppSpot is currently in its testing phase, offering free preview releases with a fixed bandwidth (5 million monthly pageviews) and disk quota of 500 MB: however, a country verification process by SMS is required in order to be able to start a project.

To find out more about AppSpot, you can either visit the site homepage or take a look at the Application Gallery, which contains editor's picks as well as the most popular applications hosted on the site.