Q&A Solution Fluther Adds Social Filtering

I have just received an update from Fluther about the new functionality that they have launched that is intended to make the service more social and reduce the noise level.

For those uninitiated, Fluther basically is a Q&A service that allows anyone to ask questions and get answers from other users familiar with the subject. While there’s nothing new about online Q&A solutions, there is something unique about Fluther: it actually allows for real-time interaction between the users around questions - actually, you can even watch people composing answers to your questions.

Recently I have seen quite a number of favorable mentions of Fluther for its iPhone application (I guess this is partly due to the fact that Fluther was selected as one of 10 best applications from the last year’s iPhoneDevCamp by Webware).

And now Fluther is adding another functionality that seems to be able to bring the service to a new level of interaction among its users. The new feature is called “your fluther” which is basically social filtering. It looks like everything should be social these days so it is no surprise to me.

Social filtering on Fluther means that a user can now track only those questions asked by his friends or other Fluther users that he deems interesting - and only participate in the discussions around these questions if he chooses so. In its core it is supposed to reduce the noise level for users and hopefully increase users’ interaction with the service.

It is always good to see startups add new features that are based on what the community finds compelling at the moment - and noise reduction is definitely of high importance now and for any growing service it is a must for it to allow users to easier find interesting pieces. And since the creators of Fluther already report the service to be doubling every three month, I hope the new addition will help with further growth as well. And although the community seems to be more technology-oriented now (the most popular tags in the tag cloud of topics on the main page are iPhone, Apple, and Mac), I do believe that it has the potential of reaching the more mainstream users as well if they continue to launch new features that would facilitate adoption as well.

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