Pollection Team Blog

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.