Pollection Team Blog

Redwood City and Fremont, CA– November 19, 2007- Frengo, a mobile social utility to make cell phones more fun, and Pollection, a wisdom-of-the-crowd platform for the social web, today announced its partnership to provide a mobile extension of the popular Facebook application, Sex Appeal developed by Pollection.

Sex Appeal (http://www.SexAppealHQ.com) is an application that allows people to vote the sexiness level of their Facebook friends and assign points to them on a “Sex-o-Meter”. Users can then boast their aggregate Sex-o-Meter score as well as their Sex Appeal title, which may range from “an acquired taste” all the way to “smokin’ hot” and “hottest of all Facebook.” Having become one the hottest applications on Facebook, Sex Appeal offers an interactive game for its fast growing user base.

Leveraging Frengo mobile, Sex Appeal users can receive mobile text alerts, invitations to play and rate others while on the go. Frengo adds mobility to this and other Facebook applications and provides an easy way for social network application developers to keep their community connected, informed and entertained via text message or wireless web when they are not in front of a computer. This partnership with Frengo is a first step toward providing a full mobile experience for Pollection customers wanting to play and use their Facebook applications on the go.

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A while back we built a little fun application called ‘Sex Appeal‘ that uses the Pollection platform to let Facebook users put their friends through an elimination game of sexiness. We just wanted to showcase our platform and have some fun in the process.

Well, it turns out our users loved the little application. We have been live for 5 weeks and the application has been growing steadily ever since! We recently crossed the half a million user mark on Facebook. It has been a lot of fun to see how users interact with the application, how sensitive they have become to their ‘Sex-o-Meter’ scores, and how they have met new people in their communities through the application.

I was digging through our databases to find some data I needed for an analysis when I thought I should checkout the poll impression and vote counts on the application as well. It turns out we recently crossed a milestone on Sex Appeal without realizing it:

• Number of Poll Impressions: 10,312,539
• Number of Votes Cast: 6,487,970

Yes, we passed the 10 million poll impression mark. And with over six million votes on who our users think are sexy, we have a wealth of knowledge about sexiness . In order to see the wisdom of crowds working, all you need to do is checkout the top sexy page in the application

Congratulations to all our sexies and to their friends for recognizing them.

We are working on exciting new features for Sex Appeal right now. So stay tuned for more fun and cool features soon.

PS: If you are a developer and you think utilizing the Pollection platform you can build other fun applications don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We are always open to new ideas and collaborative opportunities.

One of the requests that we have been getting frequently from our customers has been the ability to target their polls at a particular audience. Just like any other market research project, our customers expect to be able to say I want to only ask women which brand of clothing they think is the hippest for this fall season. Of course our customers still want to pay orders of magnitude less than a traditional market research project while having the benefits . And we are more than happy to oblige!

Starting with our release last night, you can now target your questions across three dimensions: age, gender, and geography. Simply when purchasing research poll distribution, select the dimension you want to target your polls based on. That’s it. We utilize the information our voters share with us about their demographics and expose your questions only to the relevant segment.

Right now you can choose one of the three available dimensions. As we expand this service we are planning to not only add more dimensions (education level, marital status, etc) but also give you the ability to mix and match these criteria. If you feel we should add a certain dimension sooner than others please let us know.

Happy Targeting…

Robert Berkman at Intelligent Agent has conducted an experiment with running market research surveys on Facebook. In his experiment he compares Pollection with Zoomerang and Facebook Polls.

We are very happy that Robert likes our service when compared to alternatives

“Polls” by Pollection was at least as good as Facebook’s [polls], if not better, and it was free.

For his experiment, he used Pollection to find out if Facebook users think Facebook could ever replace Google as the leading Web search engine, following up on Robert Scoble’s controversial posting.

As Rebort has mentioned in his blog post, below are some of the advantages you get when using Pollection polls compared to other services

• Multimedia Polls: You can include images, video, and audio in your polls
• Free Polls: Your polls are always free. Of course, you can purchase more distribution for as little as $5, if you wanted to get votes quicker
• Cross Platform: You can embed the same poll on Facebook, on MySpace, or any other place you can post HTML code

Joe Morel at WhosTheBoss.net has recently started to take a look at some of the polls that are running on Pollection and decipher what all of this public opinion expressed so freely means. The first poll that has caught his attention is one that has to do with gadgets:

What’s your favorite tech gadget

After analyzing the results, the Boss has concluded that

What’s the really interesting thing here? The cell phone dominates…People want to connect and communicate and they don’t really care about the technology they use to do that.

We will continue to monitor Joe’s blog for more interesting analysis and will highlight his posts here every once in a while. But make sure you check his blog as well not to miss any of his thoughts on popular polls.

Have you ever had to impress an audience of 100+ Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs in less than 2 minutes by explaining your business? If not I can tell you it can be very stressful but at the same time rewarding. We were presenting Pollection this past Thursday at the Plug & Play Expo with the purpose of getting exposure from early stage investors and that’s exactly what we had to do. The presentation went pretty well and we got to chat with multiple potential investors and partners afterwards.

Among the press in the audience was the San Jose Mercury News which ran a frontpage article about the event yesterday. They included a picture of our booth in the article which you can see on the left side. I think this is the first mainstream press coverage we have recieved which itself is a milestone for Pollection. Hurray!

Photo: Courtesy of Maria J. Avila / Mercury News

Currently at Pollection we have been using Bugzilla to track product defects and work items toward a milestone. This system has been working well for managing the implementation of individual features and fixing issues, but it has taken a lot of overhead to manage schedules and make sure that we are appropriately prioritizing our tasks based on what long haul projects are being worked on. Bug tracking systems were never designed for planning, mostly just for capturing information related to defects and sort of as a kludge that has been jury-rigged to capture work items.

As the team at Pollection grows, we need to put into place a more scalable and extensible system for merging the product plan with the actual defects, work items and releases. In the historical (and now way out of vogue) method of waterfall planning for monolithic releases, requirements and work items are very strongly defined in advance and a schedule can be concisely defined. Pollection is on a very rapid release cycle which can react quickly to the market and allows the final plan to be fleshed out dynamically. This does not integrate well into the older application level monolithic release planning and work management.

Over the last few years Agile methodologies have appeared on the scene and have attempted to deal with the new malleability of software in the Internet space. Pollection’s product is well served by the tenants of Agile development. The toolsets which have sprung up around Agile are starting to mature to the point where they can be used in serious product management.

The core requirements that we had for a product management tool suite are as follows:

1. to define what work needs to be done
2. allow transparency for the active work items
3. provide high level reporting for milestones/sprints with time estimates
4. allow high level planning with flexibility to efficiently change objectives and releases

Agile methods strongly emphasizes the interaction between individuals in the same space and encourages physical note-cards and boards for keeping track of team status. Unfortunately this isn’t always possible and doesn’t scale well for higher level transparency or reporting. To work around this, a software system is needed to track status and allow the capture of objectives and high level requirements along with the work that is associated with it.

Some of the tools which are out there are TargetProcess, Rally and XPlanner. For a more complete list see this roundup. Both TargetProcess and especially Rally impressed me. XPlanner is the best open source solution for managing the Agile process. The project has done a good job in terms of being able to capture and manage the information related to active work. TargetProcess and Rally have both invested heavily to streamline the process of managing sprints and work items. They also do a fantastic job of bringing the relevant information to the foreground based on the user who is currently logged in. XPlanner falls behind when it comes to the polish of work item and sprint management and is way behind when it comes to features like integrated bug tracking. Rally comes out ahead for our purposes because it has integration with Eclipse through Mylar, is easy to access and has a convenient dashboard along with an expertly designed and implemented toolset.

Most of the tools in this space tend to have a monthly/yearly subscription fee. Often there is a way to export all of your data from the toolset so that you can migrate to a different platform if necessary. For the short term we will continue to use Bugzilla and track the higher level work requirements in our wiki. In the future we will most likely be investing in a system such as Rally to reduce our planning costs and enable better reporting and transparency.

Our Polls Facebook application was featured on Guy Kawasaki’s blog yesterday. Guy sums up our main features very concisely in his post:

One intended use is to create gossip, celebrity, and rumor type polls, but Pollection is equally applicable to market-research tasks.

As guy noted in his, our users can easily expand beyond just Facebook and publish polls on their blogs, MySpace pages, or any web property where they can have HTML code . This functionality is not very well exposed on our Facebook application but visitor’s to Pollection.com can easily discover it. We are working on integrating this functionality on Facebook as well.

Another advantages of our polling platform is our analysis capabilities. When you create a poll with Pollection not only you get the voting results, you are also presented with a geographic distribution of votes and a timeline of when each choice got it’s votes. We have found that our users value this feature very highly as they can go deeper segmentation of their results if they see patterns.

The Pollection team joined BarCamp Block party this past weekend in Palo Alto at Socialtext’s offices. This was an anniversary event so the turn out was awesome. We met plenty of people that we want to work with and/or learn from.

Not to stray from the spirit of BarCamp, we proposed to hold a talk in the heat of moment. It was titled “Got a Social Network? Monetize it!“. We picked a small room since we didn’t expect many people with the short notice (we posted the sign roughly 2 hours before the talk).

The turn out was awesome! We had more than 10 folks jammed into a tiny room that shouldn’t hold more than 7 (clearly a firecode violation?). The discussion about ways companies monetize their social network and how Pollection’s services fit in was very inspiring. We made some very good contacts; even had our presentation videoblogged by the lovely Sarah Meyers from Valleywag. Sarah was kind enough to have our very own Alex pitch Pollection on camera in 30 seconds [it starts at 00:39 left].

That morning we showed up at BarCamp just to check it out and see what’s happening. Within 3 hours we went from just hanging-out to meeting potential business partners, presenting to potential customers, and even pitching to a journalist. Unconferences work! We highly recommend attending similar events to all technology entrepreneurs. You are gonna love it.

PS: Sarah we are waiting for that party social network invite

In order to showcase some of the capabilities of our polling platform, we created a little fun game on Facebook called Sex Appeal. Nothing too controversial really: you add the app and it creates an elimination game among your friends based on their sexiness.

Your friends face off in groups of 4 and each time you pick one that you think is the sexiest among the group, who then advances to the next round. Ultimately one of your friends will be crowned the sexiest!

As you play along the game your friends get points for winning rounds and can show off their sex appeal on their profile. Simple, right? Well, maybe not! We released the application yesterday and invited some of our close friends to play. Today it started to pick up some steam (at the time of this writing we have 90 users).

But then this afternoon the Facebook account that we created the application under mysteriously went away! When we try to login to that account we get a maintenance error page but it only happens for that particular account and nobody else!

The application is still live and working, but we can’t understand why the account is unavailable! Do you think it could be because our application has Sex in it’s name?

We did a quick search on the application directory in Facebook and only two applications have the word sex in them, both of which related to the HBO show, ‘Sex and the City’. We find it peculiar that with 2000+ applications only two have sex in their names. What do you think?

If you ever created a Facebook application that mysteriously went away (or the developer’s account went away!) please let us know. We are writing to Facebook as well for an explanation and will update you when we get a response.

Update:It turns out this was just a coincidence. Our developers account is working again as of this morning. Also, our application seems to have been accepted to the Application Directory. It still doesn’t show up under search which should be because they haven’t index their directory yet. Thank you Facebook.