If you attended President Obama’s March 26 online Town Hall meeting, you were likely more interested in how the president would answer questions about the economy, health care and higher education costs.
But what you might not have noticed was that the White House was using an application called Google Moderator, hosted on the application giant’s GoogleApp Engine platform, to screen and choose which questions the president would take, based on user input and feedback.
“We were able to handle 3 million users and hundreds of thousands of questions without investing in any build out of infrastructure,” says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager of Google Apps.