Webware

Twitter is making its way onto clothes.

(Credit: ThinkGeek)

This week, we talked a lot about how Twitter is impacting the real world--as a means of conveying information about the political situation in Iran, for example, and as a ThinkGeek T-shirt theme.

But probably our most-discussed Twitter story was about a guy who got his old Commodore 64 connected to the microblogging service. It's an awesome and fun project, and it got us wondering: where's Twitter going to show up next?

Vote in our poll, and if you come up with possible uses we missed, let us know in our TalkBack section.

If you're unsure where you should be casting your ballet come November 4, Google's got you covered with a new maps layer that lets you search for local polling locations. Users simply plug in their home address and it figures out both what county they're in and where their poll location is.

I didn't have much luck getting this to work from a few business addresses in San Francisco, but it picked up two of my former residential addresses just fine. One of the things that makes the tool useful is the special set of instructions on what you should be looking for at each location, like parking and special entrances. In the case of the church nearby my old apartment (pictured below) it's smart enough to tell me to use the front side, which could keep me from wandering around aimlessly.

All of this information has been made open source and is available for other application developers to include in their own tools, which should be popping up in the few remaining weeks.

Looking for the proper place to vote near your house? Google Maps now lets you know based on your home address.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.

PollDaddy offers free polls. (My most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die.) The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies you've signed up for.

PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, "Automattic's first office anywhere in the world." Lenehan is "extremely happy" with the deal, terms of which he did not disclose. He said that PollDaddy was "profitable and growing at a nice rate" prior to the acquisition.

Product changes that have already been implemented include tighter integration into Wordpress.com hosted blogs and a transition to Automattic's data centers. In a blog post about the acquisition, Lenehan wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months this will mean our site will be a lot more stable, polls will load faster, and everything should run just the way you want it to."

The company will continue to stay "100 percent focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow," Lenehan also wrote.

Polldaddy has already been integrated into Wordpress.com's authoring system.

In a barter arrangement with CNET, PollDaddy ran the voting system for the last Webware 100 awards.

See also: Matt Mullenweg's blog: PollDaddy Goes Automattic

We've been covering the economic crisis in depth recently (see The tech downturn: How long and how bad?). If you're a tech entrepreneur, we'd like to know how the stories of doom and gloom are affecting you. So chime in. Answer these two questions:

Just in from GigaOm: Inside Details of Sequoia Capital's Doomsday Meeting With its Companies

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.

Like polls? Check out Poll Authority, a new poll host that lets you create some really clean looking polls with relative simplicity. It offers many of the features the popular Poll Daddy does but at a lower cost for its pro service which runs at $8 a month. Stripped out are surveys, meaning you're limited to just polls, but it's set up to let you create one in less than a minute which is impressive.

Also included in the pro accounts is vote analysis, which lets you drill down and see where your voters are coming from as well as a time lines and charts that can either be exported or subscribed to through various feeds.

Out of all its features though, the built-in themes are worth the most attention because they're simple and well done. You can stretch out each poll to whatever width you want and drop in your own CSS to have it match your site.

Like Poll Daddy's answers section, Poll Authority gives you the option to make your polls public to everyone. Each poll will get its own special page where anyone can view the results and discuss. If you're looking for pure audience, Poll Daddy's got the edge with more users. A Poll Authority poll I put up earlier didn't get many outside votes, whereas ones I've done on the past with Poll Daddy get a good segment of voters who end up there from Poll Daddy's answers page alone.

Poll Authority isn't quite as advanced with handling media as some other tools I've seen. For instance Polls Boutique, which I looked at back in April lets you drop in a video for each question whereas Poll Authority only allows for one. I think most people will be more than okay with this, but it's always nice to have the option.

Poll Authority joins a slew of other services competing for user votes and traffic. See also: Quibblo, CircleUp, Toluna, StrawPoll and Twitpoll.

Its name might be wacky, but some investors with deep pockets think it's the real thing: SodaHead.com, a polling and answers site, announced Wednesday that it has raised $8.4 million in Series B venture funding. The money comes from new lead investor Mission Ventures, as well as existing investor Mohr Davidow Ventures.

The company's previous round, with veteran investor Ron Conway and Tech Coast Angels contributing, had totaled $4.3 million.

SodaHead was founded by Jason Feffer, former vice president of operations at MySpace, and his childhood friend Michael Glazer. Feffer describes the site as "the Internet's modern day town square," and has said that polling records produce so much information about user preferences that they're a dream for advertisers.

Currently, SodaHead has about 600,000 subscribers. The new venture money will be used, according to a release, to get the word out, support a growing user base, and make some "strategic hires."

Polls Boutique, which is a play on words from the 1989 Beastie Boys album, is a free polling service that's great for creating simple polls with statistical depth and a great sense of community. Like Polldaddy, which we use extensively on Webware and used for Webware 100 voting this year, and more recently on CNET News.com for the iPod survey, Polls Boutique lets users build and deploy polls to blogs or social networking profiles quickly and easily.

What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls such as photos, audio, and video clips. It also has some really great statistical analysis that lets you see the make up of your voters, both gender and age. There are also options to drill down by specific age group, geographical location, and even astrological sign (we're not counting votes from Sagittarius voters in the poll below--sorry). These numbers come alongside easy to read and simplistic charts that can be parsed quickly.

Today the service has launched a customizable widget that lets you change the colors, fonts, and background image. The design process itself is a cinch, although you can't change things like the height, width, or the font on the answers--things that really let you match a widget to the look and feel of your site. However, you can set the background to be transparent, so it will blend in to your post as it does on the example widget I've embedded below. Be sure to check out the view full statistics option to dig deep through user votes.

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.