When developing any application, getting proper user feedback during the early stages is essential if you want to have the application suit your customers’ needs. Often this is done with staged tests, but with web applications you can have the benefit of using an online method of retrieving your users’ opinions.

However, doing so can be tricky. If you want to get feedback, you can implement your own system for soliciting it, however, this takes up extra time that could be used to further develop your core web application. Alternatively, there are some existing online services that can provide survey-like questionnaires to users, but honestly, these present more trouble to the user than they’re worth.

When I first started using Stack Overflow, I noticed that the feedback service they had been using, UserVoice, was an elegant and functional solution to this problem.

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Yesterday, Google launched its SearchWiki tools, which allows registered users to promote or remove entries from a Google search to further personalize results. This will allow users to customize and tailor the results to what they’re interested in, but it’s worthwhile to note that Google has probably done something similar with their personalized search histories, already offered to registered users.

A few things to note: Firstly, while the act of promoting or removing a search result seems very akin to Digg, the result is not the same. The changes you make only affect your own search results, and Google is very clear on this. However, it would be madness to believe that Google would not use the data gathered from this social experiment to further improve their algorithms. You also have the option of adding your own results to further personalize your searches and there is an option for seeing what others have recommended/promoted or removed, providing for an interesting social experiment.

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When Stack Overflow publicly launched back in September, I registered immediately after learning about it from a coworker. The product of Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (among others), the site aimed to be a collaborative Q&A site focused on programming and software development. You could ask questions or provide answers to any of them. In their own words it was combination of “Wikis, Blogs, Forums, and Digg/Reddit”. Furthermore, they made no attempt at hiding the fact that they were designed to be better than other questionable sites, such as Experts-Exchange.

Though I registered over two months ago I’ve mostly been lurking since, but have been most astounded by the rate at which questions - often complex and very specific issues - get answered. Since the site allows users to rate/vote up other people’s answers, it provides an incentive for users to give good answers that will be recognized by others, gaining them points and increasing their “reputation score”. In this sense, it’s like Digg, but with a global ranking system.

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