uPoll: Crowd-sourcing via Twitter

Online poll services are two a penny right? They're a popular method of generating sticky content for a website and good for fostering or generating online communities.

At present, there aren't that many online poll generators which are designed to take advantage of Social Media's natural strengths when it come to crowd sourcing. Which is why uPoll has an excellent chance of leading the way in this field .

Upoll.tv is a new polling service with Twitter integration. Simply create a poll and it generates a tweet from your Twitter account directing the user back to that poll. The user then votes and is, themselves, given the option of tweeting the poll. Once the poll closes the results are tweeted.

You can also set up a poll from Twitter by tweeting @upoll, your question, and options plus the duration in minutes. This means that you can effectively crowd-source via SMS.

The application was built by Colt Seavers (no not that Colt Seavers). His background is in Community Forums but spends a lot more time on Twitter. He developed a service more suited to social networking in general and Twitter in particular:

"When I wanted to create a Poll, I looked and found there's lots of complicated voting sites, but they tend to be bulky
and monetized, rather than simple tools, for social decision making. uPoll can be used to quickly canvas opinion from your twitter friends - crowd sourcing opinion, or simply voting on where to go out at the weekend."

The polls are customisable and widgets are also available for embedding into your own website. Unusually, there is no need to register in order to use the full range of its features. "Currently we're not plugging any membership features for the site" says Colt "we decided we wanted everyone to have the same functionality ."

Also, there should be no concerns about the use and storage of the data collected from the polls: "We have no plans to store the data for closed polls. The idea is that this is disposable data. A snapshot that remains interesting only as long as it remains current."

Additional features are forthcoming which will allow you to audio, video and pictures into your poll, (fun for those goal of the week competitions on Some People On The Pitch). As a crowd sourcing tool, it looks like a lot of fun. As someone who is always looking for ways Social Media can extend democratic enfranchisement, I look forward to seeing if activists pick it up in the near future. I could easily see uPoll working well establishing frameworks for online interactive debates.

You can try out uPoll here and follow uPoll on Twitter.

tag: uPoll, Twitter, Polling, Crowd sourcing, social media

Posted via email from redduffman