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.
It seems like a great resource for really bad blogs to site incorrect statistical data.
I think it’s a great move by another fantastic Irish startup.
Thats a pretty clever idea. Will be intersting to see how well it goes against Yahoo! Answers.
I guess its giving the answer to what a majority think, rather than an individual.
They still have a lot to work out here… I like it in theory but all I’m seeing is a bunch of test polls and the language of the polls is all over the map!
3 out of the 8 popular polls listed are in English, all the others in Spanish.
They probably should have waited a couple weeks to iron out the details before announcing this.
@Mike
Its just an experiment for the moment. We want to see how people use it and what features they want to see in there. Its by no means a finished project, its only the start!
It would really interesting to see how this Irish start-up fights with other simillar services.
srini
http://codingweb.blogspot.com
Not really sure whether this is a big deal. So, other people get to look at polls that you get to create for free? I’m a PollDaddy fan, and a directory isn’t going to make me stop using it.
Mark
@David Sounds good! We did recently setup a poll with PollDaddy this week and it was pretty smooth, although I couldn’t ever get the flash widget to look quite right (text always appeared really small) so we went with the javascript in an iFrame to make it work on Facebook and it looks like it will work great.
I look forward to seeing the enhancements as you roll them out. Would love to see a nightlife & entertainment category up there
@Mike
Cheers. Yea the flash widgets on the site are pretty crap. We have just finished a MySpace App to get the JS polls working right in there. Going to sort something for Facebook soon too.
There is a pretty cool Twitter app out there called StrawPoll (http://www.strawpollnow.com). I wonder if they are considering becoming a business?
They should stick to just polls and distributing them on the internet. For them to try to create a “community” is pretty lame….just like every other Tom, Dick and Harry. Stick to what you are good at…if you have never created a social network, save the investors money and don’t! I have some ocean front property in arizona (USA) if you want to buy it?
@David (#9) - I like the honesty =)
TechCrunch needs to provide some competitive analysis instead of acting like this is a first. PollDaddy is a late entry to this crowded space. Vizu launched this exact site more than two years ago and today there are many others including Sodahead, Dpolls, etc.
Personally, I think there are too many players here already, plus how are any of them going to make money?
I spoke with the CEO of PollDaddy earlier in the week, before this post on TC. I directed them to partner with my former company, Global Market Insite (GMI) to recruit responsdents for market research. The recruiting bounty is in the range of $1-3 per recruit, depending on the country. Easy money, and better than the typical affiliate deal or PPC. Poll participants are a natural target for participation in compensated surveys. And yes, PollDaddy needs a revenue model. Respondent recruitment is a start and GMI operates the world’s largest online panel. And yes PollDaddy is far from alone in this sector. Vizu is just one of many. New ones crop up all the time. PerkyPoll.com was also announced this week in Seattle by serial entrepreneur John Knapp. The untapped opportunity is to tie this back to an aggregation platform that combines behavioral and attitudinal profiling, yet does this without compromising personal privacy. The company that I believe is going to nail this is Demoxi, which I backed in June 2007 through the purchase of assets of two companies, Votehere and Dategrity, which had cumulatively spent $20 million, largely to secure 53 issued patents related to anonmyized polling and online identity. Demoxi will launch its commercial product later this month.
with all the respect for polldaddy, 99Polls.com were doing the same only from the beginning and a lot better.