Information enhancing method using software agents in a social networking system

1. An information enhancing method for use with a first social-topical networking system and with external platform systems that are external of the first social-topical networking system and provide social interaction services, where the first social-topical networking system maintains in a memory thereof, a communally-controlled topic space populated by spatially and/or hierarchically organized topic nodes each having respective topic defining data logically associated therewith, wherein the maintained topic space is communally-controlled due to automatically repeated updating thereof based on automatic uploads of current focus-indicating records for, and based on explicit and/or implicit votes of plural users of the first social-topical networking system, the updating being in terms of at least one of spatial and/or hierarchical organization of the topic nodes within the topic space and in terms of the topic defining data that is logically associated with respective ones of the topic nodes, the method comprising:

causing instantiation, within a machine system having processors, of a software agent that is structured to be able to search for, find and convey potentially new or different, and thus potentially informationally enhancing data signals to the first social-topical networking system for potential addition at least into a specified portion of the communally-controlled and automatically repeatedly updated topic space of the first social-topical networking system of corresponding data items represented by the potentially informationally enhancing data signals, where information represented by the potentially informationally enhancing data signals is potentially new or different relative to information represented by a current version of the topic defining data of at least one of the topic nodes of the automatically and repeatedly updated topic space;

causing the instantiated software agent to begin searching for and collecting from the one or more external platform systems that provide social networking services, potentially new or different, and thus potentially informationally enhancing data items found by the agent in the one or more external platform systems,

causing the instantiated software agent to begin conveying the collected potentially new or different, and thus potentially informationally enhancing data items by way of said potentially informationally enhancing data signals to the first social-topical networking system; and

causing initiation of a determination as to whether one or more of the conveyed and potentially informationally enhancing data items is new or different relative to information currently represented by the topic defining data of the at least one of the topic nodes of the communally-controlled and automatically repeatedly updated topic space.

2. A machine-assisted process of obtaining one or more answers to posed questions, the process comprising:

submitting a question to a first social-topical networking system having a question processing program, wherein the first social-topical networking system is one that uses at least one processor and maintains in a memory thereof, a topic space populated by spatially and/or hierarchically organized topic nodes each having respective topic defining data logically associated therewith and wherein the maintained topic space is automatically repeatedly updated by the first social-topical networking system in terms of at least one of organization of the topic nodes within the topic space and the respective topic defining data that is logically associated with respective ones of the topic nodes;

interacting with the question processing program so as to converge on one or more of the topic nodes in the topic space of the first social-topical networking system, where the one or more converged on topic nodes are those whose respective topic or topics are well connected with a topic that the first social-topical networking system guesses as being intended by the posed question;

receiving from the system question processing program a list of Tipping Point Mavens or other consensus-wise elected experts who are logically linked by the first social-topical networking system to the converged upon one or more topic nodes and whose works of expertise match one or more of keywords, tags and/or URLs associated with the posed question;

picking a subset of the listed experts; and

automatically forwarding the posed question to the selected subset of experts.