I believe that's the point. X is no different to your water-cooler chats. Rather than degrade the former, this comparison is meant to upgrade the latter. There

I believe that's the point. X is no different to your water-cooler chats. Rather than degrade the former, this comparison is meant to upgrade the latter. There is a class of problems that don't sit nicely in a single domain and can benefit from collaboration. When we engage in spit-balling we are (un)consciously looking to extend the scope of our solution search. From experience such discussions almost never go anywhere beccause that space is really vast and intractable. I imagine a new service here: Google Watercooler, providing tools to extend X into your spitball sessions and vice versa. Like TedX: call it XX.