Google India has launched an information sharing firefox plugin called Noticeboard that helps people access and share information over the Internet using public digital noticeboards.

People can create text messages or record voice snippets and post them to one or more noticeboards – each noticeboard message can be accessed publicly.

Using the Noticeboard, we can directly record voice snippets and post them as notices on one or more Noticeboards. Typically each Noticeboard is associated with a community such as people residing in a particular village or members of an NGO. Each Noticeboard is associated with a unique email address. After a one-time set up, the Noticeboard should be usable by people with no prior computer experience. Since messages are primarily voice based, even literacy is not a pre-requisite.

Once you install the firefox plugin,  hop to your Gmail account, add contact details and configure IMAP (lets Noticeboard act as an interface for recording and sending voice mails to other accounts and also helps users listen to voice mails sent by others).

The product is too geeky to get started – sweetly crashes FF3/too buggy in it’s current avatar – weird error messages keep showing up! – see the detailed guide here.

While the product is meant for community noticeboards (community announcements, social interactions, local buying and selling, and information that is of wider interest to the community.), I do expect major usage of this service in the upcoming elections.

What’s your opinion?

Tags: google india