Web startup yoomoot sets out to organize the world's discussions

Online, May 13, 2010 (Newswire.com) - The problem
The Internet has revolutionized communication, but it could do better. The big problem is that the Web still can't handle hundreds of people coming together and having a discussion. We're still relying on old metaphors and old ways of communicating. Consider the comments you see below a popular news article: it's not a conversation, it's a cacophony. High-quality comments get submerged, the same topics endlessly repeat themselves and hardly anyone bothers to read what's already been written.

The solution
yoomoot offers a new way of having an online discussion which solves those poblems with three key features:
1. Permitted participants can edit each other's posts, encouraging the improvement of existing posts over the unnecessary creation of new posts.
2. Every post has a summarized version, so that you can quickly scan over the summarized version of a whole conversation.
3. Every reply has to be worded as a question and answer. So instead of an overwhelming mass of undifferentiated comments, everything is neatly organized according to the specific question it addresses. Additionally, wording thoughts as Q&A forces us to think carefully about the point of what we're saying, encouraging structured, goal-focused thinking.

Not another Q&A site
Q&A? Collaborative editing? Superficially, yoomoot resembles wiki-come-Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. However these sites are not designed for long, complex conversations - the kind which inevitably involve many different tangents and competing interpretations. yoomoot's unique interface is based around nested hierarchies of Q&A, allowing massive conversations to be entirely structured as Q&A. In contrast, all existing Q&A sites are based around a single Q&A accompanied by standard comment threads. yoomoot also has various secondary features, too numerous to describe here, all focused on organized communication.

What's yoomoot's revenue model?
1) At first, yoomoot will be a standalone site supported by advertising and paid-for premium accounts (these will remove advertising and give users greater control over their profile).
2) Later, we'll release yoomootpro, a subscription service which provides organizations with their own private version of yoomoot to use for more effective knowledge-sharing.
3) Later still, we'll develop a plugin which allows blogs and other websites to use yoomoot to handle their comments. Very high-traffic sites will be charged for this service.

Background
yoomoot was founded by Barbara Nowacka (http://bit.ly/9qiZ7X) and Nicolas Holzapfel (http://bit.ly/9laoBu). We met on an MA in Interactive Media at the University of the Arts London and the idea for yoomoot came out of a project we did together. Messy comments and forums was one thing we and other students all found frustrating about the Web and we became obsessed with solving it. We are based in London, UK.

Screenshots
http://ow.ly/1KEhM
http://ow.ly/1KEic
http://ow.ly/1KEiw

More info
To access the site prior to the launch on 15th May please contact us at [email protected]