Flavio about Business 2.0

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

After finally having received some invitations to blog for trigami, I decided to give it a try with a new Web 2.0 service. The product is called Netvoting and is basically a polling service, with widgets that you can implement in your blogs - a product that has been existing for years. What they added now is a social network layer to the voting, hoping this would create additional value and convince bloggers and other pollsters to use their service.

The registration proved difficult because gmail classified the confirmation email as spam and had to be found in the spam folder. And gmail normally has a very good spam recognition rate, so I wonder why it failed this time.

After having registered, the use of the platform is pretty straightforward. You create your poll by:

1. Entering the question
2. Entering the possible answers
3. Choosing some settings

and off you go!

I must say that the product is great when it comes to settings, it let’s you choose between fraud detection over cookies or cookies and IP and correctly warns you that if you use IP some people sitting behind the same NAT Router might not be able to vote correctly, so it suggests that you use cookies:

After creating your poll you can let people on netvoting vote and you should also be able to embed a widget using javascript, which did simply not work. I had to resort to the code for the working power widget of another blogger to make it work:

This Power Widget seems to be working fine and is definitely a handy way to include a poll into your blog. But the fact that I couldn’t make it work proves that quite a lot of work still needs to be done.Another feature that I really like about netvoting is its statistics visualization of demographics. Here’s a look:

Small but very interesting features are the following:

• rss feed of your voting in order to stay updated of the votes cast (for your netvibes page, for example).

• publish to mainstream blog hosters and also to major social networks including facebook and myspace with just one click

I took a look at the social networking functionality and it really is exactly the same as on every other social network: profile, friends, groups etc. And I frankly don’t see the connection between voting and social networking. On a social network, you might want do polling from time to time, but would you want to do social networking around polling?

Overall, the amount of features are great, I especially like the social network and rss integration. On the other hand, I see no need to create yet another social network around polling. And it is definitely not stable yet, as a couple of things didn’t work out properly. But if they can fix that, it is a useful quick poll creation service with extensive publishing functionality.