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Social Researching: Like social bookmarking, combined with joining comments so you can share and collaborate on your research.

Think "trails" from V Bush's "As we may think" article, implemented so we can collaborate. As users start bookmarking things in their own trail, the app works out what other trails are similar and suggests you merge your researching efforts.

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This idea has a /lot/ of use cases. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a business out of it -- maybe you allow public collaborations free, and charge to take it private.

It'd sink or swim on the details of the UI, though, and I have frankly no idea how to get those right. Lots of painstaking user testing, presumably.

Google wave was great for almost this, actually, minus the matching / merging part! Sad to see it go.

Yes. I think this idea is almost in many things but you need to give the user the structure to both read and contribute to a thread of research.

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