PollDaddy Attempts to Create Yahoo Answers for Polls

PollDaddy, a company until now focused on distributing poll and survey widgets, is taking a stab at turning its website into a more formidable destination.

How? Well, by doing what any company that has distributed its services across the web would do: by pulling them and their associated data back home. The company has decided to set up a central directory of the polls that its users have deployed elsewhere. These 300,000 polls will be searchable and browsable from a sub-site called PollDaddy Answers starting today.

As is evident from the name, PollDaddy wants to leverage its widgets into creating a Yahoo Answers of sorts but one focused on polls. Users will be able to leave comments to these polls as well.

How will widget publishers react? I can imagine at least some of them finding it disconcerting that they’ve lost control over where their polls have been published (and for what audiences). Only premium PollDaddy users will have the ability to opt out of the directory. But on the flip side, a central directory will appeal to people who want to run polls but who don’t have their own websites. With PollDaddy Answers, they can now set up profile pages and list all of their polls there.