Webware

Over the weekend, poll-making tool PollDaddy quietly released a new OpenSocial app called PollDaddy Jr. It's got all of PollDaddy's features squeezed into a "mini app" (not to be confused with a widget) that can travel the rounds to any OpenSocial-ready network.

I gave the app a spin on Hi5 and MySpace, and both offer the same experience of building polls like you would on PollDaddy's own site, but nested within the confines of the social network instead.

What may be more interesting is the chat I had with PollDaddy founder David Lenehan. Lenehan says the company has started to experiment with media polls, something that's been offered by many competitors that let you stick photos, videos, and audio clips within a poll or survey. You can actually do this just fine in surveys, PollDaddy's long-form questionnaire product, but Lenehan plans to make this available in polls in the near future.

Also "on the drawing board" is a native iPhone application that will tap into your PollDaddy account. Lenehan says it will be mostly a tracking tool to keep an eye on polls you've placed around the Web, but will also let you create entirely new polls. He's also hoping to integrate it with the Answers service, which currently has more than 700,000 user-created polls.

Polling services have been a hot commodity lately. PollDaddy competitor Sodahead snagged an $8.4 million in Series B venture funding a few weeks ago, which Lenehan says he's excited about since PollDaddy is about the same size with just two people onboard.

Our favorite polling service, PollDaddy, just launched Twitter Polls. It's a a quick way to create a poll, which will them embed a link to itself in a Twitter post that goes out under your name.

It's easy to use, and it works as advertised. If you have a lot of Twitter followers, you can use it to start getting results very quickly. My little test poll got about a dozen replies in 20 seconds, which was great.

But we're talking about Twitter, a medium that specializes in the fleeting. After the first batch of votes, my poll post must have rolled off my followers' pages, and polling replies slowed to a trickle.

For quick polls where you don't need a statistically reliable response, nor much feedback after the first few minutes, this is a fun, little tool.

Follow me on Twitter.

PollDaddy Answers puts a lot of opnion in one place.

PollDaddy makes a polling engine I like so much that I asked them to provide the technology for the Webware 100 awards. Thanks to them, I couldn't be happier with the way the voting is going. As of this writing, we've recorded more than 980,000 votes. (Go vote!)

Today, the company is taking its technology and opening it up in an interesting way: polls that users create on free accounts are now accessible from a centralized PollDaddy site, and each poll also gets its own page where users can not just participate in it but add comments on the poll being displayed.

The goal, said PollDaddy CEO David Lenehan, is to, "create a community similar to Yahoo Answers, but with the emphasis on polls as opposed to open-ended questions and answers."

I like this new feature since it exposes polls on small sites to more users, and it also lets sites share polls, making results potentially more reliable. And the central clearinghouse of polls makes for good SEO bait. It could drive traffic to the polls' host sites.

PollDaddy is also launching an OpenSocial app next week, which will make it easier for users to drop polls on personal sites, and presumably share results across them.

But I do have two reservations: First, polls are not Q&A services, and it's a very different thing to troll through a database of poll results than to look for answers to questions that you may have. I looked through the polls currently on the system and found very few that were worded in a way that anyone but the original pollster would understand the results of. In other words, everyone knows how to ask an open-ended question, but it appears to me that few people know how to set up a good multiple choice opinion poll. Maybe that's my training in experimental psychology speaking, though.

Also, if you want to use a PollDaddy poll to collect opinions just from your own site's users, be advised that with the free PollDaddy accounts, you cannot opt out of this poll-sharing scheme. To keep your poll focused, you'll need to upgrade to a paid account. TechCrunch also pointed this out.

In other PollDaddy news, Scott Rafer is now an advisor to the company. Rafer recently flipped MyBlogLog to Yahoo. That experience bodes well for PollDaddy's future.

Today PollDaddy is launching a new line of pro services for users looking to get a little more from their polls than the average Joe. There are two new tiers, which run at $20 and $99 a month respectively. Pro users get to remove the PollDaddy branding, effectively turning the service into a white-labeled solution. They can also get support over the phone, as well as a sizable increase on response caps up to 1,000 and 10,000 responses, which for free account holders is limited to just 100.

The real hook, however, is the new set of reporting tools that let you see where your voters are coming from and can detect fraudulent votes by IP address and cookie manipulation. For anyone who's looking to use a service like this for something important, you're going to want this capability as it can deter gaming and help keep your operation legit. As an added security measure, you can also now opt to keep responses confidential.

In addition to the new pro accounts, free users are getting a slight bump in their service as well. Free accounts now get three times as many answers than before (now 100 up from 30). There are also new formats to view tracked data, including XML and CSV exporting along with an RSS feed you can subscribe to so you can watch the data as it comes in.

While we've never done a hands-on with the service here on Webware (despite them being a Webware 100 award winner), the premise is fairly simple. Users can create Web polls that can be embedded on any blog or Web site. Everything is set up to be extremely easy to use, to the point where you really don't need to know any HTML or coding to put together fairly complex, multipart polls and surveys. The service originally started out as a widget to put on your blog or social-networking profile, but with the launch of their pro accounts, it's clear they're trying to take things to the next step and offer something with a higher degree of control.

See where your poll respondents are coming from and break them down by percentage. You can also now export the date into a multitude of formats like XML and CSV files to export and use in other applications.

(Credit: Polldaddy )