Google Project DriveL will revolutionise online discussions and debates

Hard on the heels of the news on Google Babble comes an inside leak of another linked secret project: Google DriveL. This super-secret "social community connector" will allow all discussion about a topic to be seen in a single thread, a "rich community experience".

An internal document I have seen from a source close to Google says

Project DriveL addresses the issue of community fragmentation head on. Currently a topic can be discussed simultaneously on the comments for a core blog post or article triggering the discussion, other posts responding, Google+ re-posts of the article, forums, and assorted other social platforms such as facebook and twitter...

Apparently DriveL is an extension to Google Drive (hence the name) which links multiple comment sources together into a single view, sorry "rich community experience", of the discussion. This is known as a "huddle", which will be accessible from Drive and Google+. From the screenshots, it looks very like a Google Hangout, with

• a row of "voices" (profile pics) across the bottom of...
• a main screen showing comment clippings
• a Drive-like folder/file explorer on the left-hand side
• and a chat/edit window and and toolbox down the right-hand side.

One of the features they seem particularly pleased with is the ranking/prioritising of voices within the Huddle.

Each voice is assigned a Knowledge Quality Index. The KQI is derived from

1. Volume of output
2. Emotional index
3. Number of followers
4. Geographic mobility
5. Social transparency: personal data shared, check-ins, photo tagging...

The following quantifiers were rejected as impractical or outmoded

• Formal qualifications
• Employer
• Academic citations
• Logical consistency
• Vocabulary, grammar and spelling

I was more interested in the following snippets I found deep in the document

As facebook has been designated a non-strategic platform due to its forecast decline, the decision was taken to engineer available sources and APIs to provide a minimum-cost integration of facebook comments with DriveL...

and this one was a bit chilling

Reconciliation of identities across platforms to aggregate a voice is not anticipated to present any issues to the Google Social Graph engine...

Google famously modify their "doodle" at the head of their homepage for important occasions. My insider tells me that on the day of announcement of DriveL, the doodle will feature its interface. So look for a Google DriveL huddle doodle soon.

I can't reveal my source, but here is a clue.