One of the simplest ways to use Twitter is to conduct instant polls among your followers. But compiling all the replies is an ad-hoc and messy process. Enter twtpoll, a simple polling app that lets you ask multiple choice questions and provides a shortened URL that you can Tweet. All you do is enter your Twitter user name (no password), create the poll, and then hit the “Twitter” option and it creates a Tweet populated with the question and the link to the poll. (You can also ask via Facebook if you are signed in).
I created a poll asking what kind of startups do we need in 2009, with the following choices:
- Social search
- Electric-car batteries
- Webtop Apps
- Cheap Netbooks
- Online Reputation Keeper
The question became this Tweet, which links to a page where you can answer the poll. PollDaddy offers Twitter Polls that are similar.
I kind of wish you could see all the choices and answer via Twitter somehow instead of being taken off to a separate site, but there is only so much you can do in 140 characters.
Cool !
So, are we going to see a ton of web apps that simply take an existing idea, and add some form of twitter integration to it? (Redirecting to twitter.com with a msg prefilled) You could just use any one of the hundreds of polling sites out there and paste the link yourself, so I’m not sure what the advantage is of using this instead.
Still, good marketing and twitterers will eat this up. Hell, I’ll use it myself
Twitter itself is an old idea… (the old chat rooms, remember those?) But sometimes those little things (prefilled msg, link to @twitter profile, etc) makes a big different.
To me, it was just a fun project I did last night, but I’m glad some people are finding it fun and somewhat useful…
To learn about Islam or to find out how it is the best religion, visit http://www.isla...cb.blogspot.com
Nice set of shortcuts definitely.
John
Interesting Idea, I will give it a try!
Is there anything but the Twitter and iPhone TC can cover?
Great concept. The chart in your post is interesting, a large number polled choose social search. Cool
Cheers,
Rob
I didn’t realize that we needed more startups. Maybe there should have been a choice to say we don’t need any more. Granted, we’ll have more if we want them or not.
@ John Lynn – Yours is the kind of mentality startups should ignore, and may I suggest you never mentor a startup with your pessimism.
Without more startups, there is no more innovation outside of the big tech. companies. How tragic would that be?
Surely it’s not about what you want personally, since you seem overwhelmed by the overload of ’shiny new toys’ but instead startups solving problems that the big boys do not?
Solving problems that enhance lifestyle, health, the environment, profitability or publicity of small businesses and startups. These are problems that inspire thousands of us around the world to make a change.
One more blog I don’t need on my bookmarks is yours. Won’t even hover the snapshiot.
You’re absolutely right, we don’t need any new startups. We don’t need new businesses and new ideas creating new jobs in new industries. We’re doing just fine the way we are. Just ask GM.
The world will always need new startups. We just don’t need any crappy ones like Seesmic and all the useless Twitter apps TC has been covering lately.
Hello,
Thanks for this great tool Erick.
I think this could be used a way to engage your Twitter followers and draw them into a closer relationship. This is also a great way to gather business intelligence through Twitter.
Thanks,
Jeff Newman
Technee
Hosted IT Solutions
Sounds like a cool app that could improve over time. I think there will be more third party tools surrounding data collection so Twitter can be used to drive specific tweets throughout.
Should also check out Strawpoll
http://www.strawpollnow.com/
Thank you all. I’m glad you liked it. Please enjoy! In case you feel like sending a greeting card via Twitter, I did another similar one last week: http://twtcard.com
Glad to see an identified need for more social search. Will say little more except watch out for http://mivui.com which hopes to come out of prototyping and private testing in 2009; to contribute towards devolving some savings and power back to the people.
I have so many uses for this. This is great. Hopefully it improves over time. Better data collection, etc, etc.
Do we really need more social and online reputation stuff?
No.
I vote for this blog to be changed to twittercrunch. Anyone agree?
last year all they covered was Facebook, this year it’s Twitter/iPhone =)
or maybe a separate twittercrunch website for all the twitter posts.
Great! we just made a first try
What’s your favorite Twitter Tool? http://twtpoll.com/uvjw33
Love Twhirl, but to be honest I haven’t seen the latest versions of all its competitors in a while now.
Voted!
Speaking of Twitter Polls – you guys forgot to mention this one as competition (SocialToo). Mike, when are you going to take Guy up on his bet?
http://socialto...survey/view/203
I’ve just created a twtpoll on what book I should read next. TC’ers give me your opinions!
http://twtpoll.com/h87p42
Can we all make the pledge that we’ll use this to see who our readers think will win Sunday’s game and not to make any real decisions that we think are based on tangible data?
This looks like the ultimate biased sample of biased samples within biased populations. Unless you’re asking your tweeple about something specific to Twitter, you’re drowning in your own bathwater.
It looks like fun. Just don’t use it for business.
Finally a useful Twitter application
Thanks. It can be fun too… and useful.
What we don’t need is more pie charts in the world.
A bar graph would more quickly and clearly show 1) Which answer is most popular, and 2) how much less popular the other answers are. Ugh.
Maybe I’ll add the option to choose other graphs later. I like pie (mmm), so I went with it for now. Good point though. Thanks!
For a take on a reputation keeper, see our recently released Karma widget: http://duckduck....com/karma.html
It lets you display your karma from various sites (twitter, digg, YouTub, etc.) on your sites.
Here is poll I created:
Poll: Who is known as the first venture capitalist? http://twtpoll.com/wctxpx
Twitter(ANYTHING) is a good idea now.
This is a cool application! I’ll definitely be using it.
Krissy Know
http://www.twit...r.com/iamkrissy
Just live yesterday on my project re-searchr.com is polling with inline twitter, friendfeed (no facebook api, doesn’t allow it yet) answering.
This means you can answer a poll without leaving twitter’s (or friendfeed’s) site.
Additionally I have support for asking general questions, with general commenting (again inline from twitter or friendfeed, or from re-searchr.com).
Re-searchr keeps a full history of your question/answers (they are publicly indexed unless sharing is disabled), and I’ll be adding some data mining features just as fast as I can write them.
http://www.re-searchr.com
re-searchr.com looks interesting but a toolbar? I think most of us are very leary of toolbars, I know I am.
As for twtpoll, as was pointed out, SocialToo already has the same thing so it’s not exactly original or a better option as far as I can tell.
Toolbar is only if you want the “re” part of re-searchr
. Just sign up and you can send questions to friendfeed, twitter and facebook, no toolbar needed (guess I need some better messaging!).
The toolbar does a lot of stuff, it basically analyzes your searches on the major search engines as you do them, returns some scoring, as well as keywords for each search result, a text preview of the page (much more useful than the image previews), as well as some other information. Basically the toolbar just gives you a bunch of extra analysis of the search results you get without clicking through to the actual search result page. The toolbar also stores your search history across all major search engines (if you use more than one)… instead of having to go to each one individually.
But again the toolbar is 100% OPTIONAL (sorry for the caps have to stress this).
What about a poll that would ask what is the number one feature that would get you to buy the service or product I sell?
Is it just me or is twtpoll.com not working for anybody else right now?
I am puzzled too. It wasn’t working for me too, and I was working with @felipecoimbra to figure the issue.
Felipe mentioned something about a firefox bug, I tried with opera and it worked. After that it worked for firefox too! Weird@#$!!
I think I found what the problem was. If you have problems accessing twtpoll, please send me a message @twtpoll. Sorry about that!
Felipe,
The same problem is re-occurring for me. It’s 2:42 AM EST on Sunday, Jan 4.
ps. I don’t have a twitter account
excellent!
Cool functionality for social net workers interested in getting feedback on events and campaigns. I know I will try this app.