Monday, November 19, 2007

Polldaddy Gets Serious

Our friends from Polldaddy, the online polling service we use here at RWW, have launched a new version of their site. The new features:

  • New online survey tool;
  • Addition of pro account for $20 per month - gives users more access to the site and allows removal of the link to PollDaddy in their polls;
  • New indepth reporting on voters, voter location and IP analysis for fraud detection;
  • Many other new little features for the polls tool, such as hiding results from voters once they have voted and ability to change the system text in the poll into foreign languages.

Co-founder David Lenehan [disclosure: David is an occasional writer for RWW] told me that "the main thing about this launch is what it allows us to do in the future". The original PollDaddy, according to David, was an experiment - so the code for the original site was not built to scale. With the new version, they've re-written the entire application from the ground up. So PollDaddy version 2 is, said David, "a starting point to launch PollDaddy as a full blown professional application."

So what can we expect in the future from Polldaddy? Surveys are the first new feature, and in the coming months Polldaddy will build a platform for "collecting data from the web" - which means services such as forms, quizzes, and other user-requested services. David told me that Polldaddy hopes "to build a system eventually that will ask our users what kind of data they want to collect and provide them with a selection of ways to do it."

Polldaddy has 2 full time developers, including David. Their polls are registering 70 million impression per month and they seem to be the biggest online poll provider (but please let us know in the comments if you know of bigger poll services). Polldaddy has around 70,000 registered users at present.

In terms of Polldaddy's integration within social networks, David said they are working on integrating with Google's OpenSocial "before Christmas." Apparently 20% of their polls are used on social network profiles. The other 80% are made up of blogs and websites, such as RWW.

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