Obtaining user feedback in the digital age

Google's email program is flawed. One of the labels in the 'labs' section says Enable, when it really should say Enabled (the meaning is reversed). Granted, this could hardly be considered a show stopping bug, but I felt the urge to point this out, and so I clicked on their 'give us feedback' link. A few moments later I was signed up to the Google Group for the Gmail product. Two minutes after that, my feedback was posted, and I went back to work.

What I hadn't realised was that I was about to receive a major insight into just how powerful Open Innovation can be. Five minutes ago, I received an email, from the Google group, containing a digest of the suggestions that had been submitted. There were 25 of them. Out of curiosity I scanned through them, and found that they were all useful contributions. Not one of them was enticing me to buy a time share in Vanuatu, or some dodgy pills. But that's not the amazing part. The truly astonishing part about this email was that it was very similar to the one I received an hour earlier, and the one before that. In fact, as far as I can tell, Google is receiving dozens and dozens of useful suggestions every hour.

Obviously, a company of Google's size is likely to attract a lot of feedback, but I simply hadn't realised just how much they receive. It would seem as though a key problem for many organisations will be how to make sense of the huge amount of feedback that is available to them, and how to integrate it into their design process.

How can they identify priorities from the fire hydrant of comments, and how can they evolve their products fast enough to take advantage of the stream of ideas?