Back in 2008, Google launched Google Moderator, a tool to help presenters prioritize questions for Q&A sessions. Since then, we’ve seen it in action a number of times, often from the company itself, but also in political settings, and other democratic-style events.

"Google Moderator is used extensively within Google for meetings and to collect feedback from Googlers on events or happenings within the company," says Colby Ranger of the Google Moderator team. "It is also used at conferences and other events to organize and draw upon the collective wisdom of the participants."

Now anyone can build tools around Google Moderator, as the company has released an API for it.

Features:

– Create: You can create new series, topics, submissions, or votes on behalf of the currently authenticated user.

– Discover: You can retrieve topics in a series, or submissions in a particular topic or series. You can also track the current aggregate status of votes.

Examples of how the API have been illustrated by Google itself, and it will be interesting to see what ways developers outside of the company utilize it. It’s a pretty interesting tool with a great deal of potential, and with a mobile version (already developed in a Googler’s 20% time) it is portable as well.