Pollection Team Blog

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…

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.

We can’t believe it has already been a week since we released our Facebook application. We got some really good feedback from our early adopters and published a refresh to the product last night. If you have already used the application you will immediately notice two major improvements: the visual touch ups in the poll widget, and better navigation of public polls.

We also included a number of other improvements such as

• Searching based on tags
• Ability to ask multiple friends to vote
• Ability to post any poll to your profile
• Ability to see the next poll without voting

among others. Let us know what you think.

We still have many more exciting features that we will be releasing in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

We are launching our product on Facebook platform tonight. Our application, Polls, is an F8 application that lives natively inside the Facebook universe. Polls application allows you to create your own multimedia polls for free. You can then place the poll on your profile, invite friends to vote, and monitor the results. It allows you to use images, videos, or sounds in the poll. Here are some of the features we are launching tonight

• Create Rich Polls: Your polls can include movie clips, images, or even songs. Simply upload your media files during poll creation and that’s it. We take care of everything else. You can use these media files for the poll question itself or for any of the answer choices.
• Share with Friends: Once you have created your poll (or if you come across a cool one by someone else) you can easily share it with friends or post it to your profile. Like any other content in Facebook, click on the share button and spread the joy.
• Comment on Polls: Click on the comments button and we take you to the poll page where you can also leave comments for the poll just like you would write on somebody’s wall.
• Friends’ Opinions: See what polls your friends are interested in. Click on the Polls link in the Applications menu (upper left hand side) and we show you the recently created polls by your friends and also which polls they have been voting on.
• Invite Voters: If you want a friend to definitely vote on your poll simply go to the poll page, enter their name in the invite box on the upper right section of the page and click Vote. A notification (similar to a new friend notification) will show up the next time they login to Facebook which takes them to the poll for their vote.
• Promote your Poll: When you create a poll, it is automatically added to your profile. This way, visitors to your profile will see the poll and can vote on it right on your profile. You can even do more by sharing the poll from your profile.
• Keep in Touch: And of course we publish your actions to the news feed so your friends know what you are up to. If you create a poll or vote on a poll, a story is published to your mini-feed. For example

So, what are you waiting for? If you are a Facebook user click here to get our application. You can read more about it here. If you have any suggestions or comments, don’t hesitate to email us or leave us a message here. We hope that you enjoy our application.