Ask500 beta

Ask500People recently unveiled its “Business” service,  which supercharges paid polls with rapid responses, richer demographics, and private results. And you’ve always been able to test drive a business poll for free. But many of you have asked to see more votes included in our free trial.  We’re happy to oblige.

We’ve now tripled the number of votes in the free business poll test drive to fifteen. Now you’ll be able to see an even richer picture of what you get with a paid poll on Ask500People!

We’ve also broadened our business poll options to offer as few as 50 votes or as many as 1,000 votes, with prices beginning as low as $9.

Check out Ask500People for Business today. After your free taste, we think you’ll see the value of our rapid polling service!

One of the new features we’re proud to unveil is tagging. While you’ve always been able to search Ask500People.com (courtesy Google), tags offer a more elegant way to navigate through polls and discussions by topic.

When crafting a poll, you can tag them with keywords to help categorize it. Then, when visitors click a tag, they can see a list of all questions related to that topic. For example, you can find polls that are tagged “health,” “politics,” or “religion.”

If you’re in the mood to browse around, hit the new Ask500People tag cloud. It lists dozens of the tags used on the site. The more popular the tag, the larger it appears in the cloud. Perhaps not surprisingly, “economy” is well represented.

Want to know more about tags as a concept? Wikipedia to the rescue!

We know how addictive Ask500People can be, or how irresistible polls about personal preferences and pet peeves can be.  But the business applications for rapid, real-time polling have been obvious from the start.

Recently, Ask500People quietly added a “Business” tab to its interface, to allow companies to tap the power of crowdsourcing to get feedback within minutes, not days. Businesses can now get instant feedback on logo designs, weight interest in competing features, or test price points, and adapt their plans on the fly.

Business polls run immediately, and get VIP access to the Ask500People polling network, which includes dozens of partner sites. Results include demographics like age, gender, education, location and income, and graphs show demographic voting trends.

Want to see how Ask500People can help your company?  Test drive our new business polling feature for free.

We’re quite proud of our vote maps, which show where in the world people are voting on polls. But since our maps usually determine locations based on IP addresses, you sometimes saw your pin drop in the wrong place. After all, your Internet Service Provider could be located across town… or across the border.

Well, say goodbye to perplexing pin placement. You can now edit your location as part of your profile.

This is one of our most-requested features, and we’re happy to help make sure your votes are mapped to where you are.

With great power comes great responsibility, however. Edit your location wisely, as you’ll only be able to change it three times.

The community that has grown around the Ask500People site is amazing, and continues to impress us with its wit and passion. Still, one of the first goals of Ask500People was to make it easy for you to post and share polls on your blogs and websites. You can get answers from your readers and visitors, as well as from the Ask500People community and network (adding a nice touch of interactivity and activity).  We also know that you might like to tell your friends about Ask500People… but it’s even better to show them.

Enter our new-and-improved “Embed” feature for Ask500People polls.

While we’ve had embeddable polls for a while, this upgraded version is copy-and-paste easy. No jargony API key required! Just put the code provided into your blog post or web page and it’s live. Now it’s easier than ever to share your poll — or any poll— anywhere on the web, vote map and quick results included!

Of course, we still have the simpler and smaller sidebar widget available for every question. And if you just want to automatically show the latest Ask500People poll, there’s a widget for that, too! Finally, if you want to do even more with Ask500People polls, check out the Ask500People API.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments… or just vote in the poll!

Just yesterday we said we were “closing in on 500 votes,” and as the perfect cherry on top of this week’s upgrade sundae, Ask500People saw its first 500-vote question answered. User cleve from Bosnia and Herzegovina asked, “How old are you?” And to date, 517 people answered.  (So far, 60 percent of the voters are between 20 and 39 years of age.)  Thanks to everyone for helping us grow into our name!

We’re finally launched!

We’d love to hear feedback either here on the blog or through our contact us form.

We know there are a few browser issues, other details, and YES we definitely know you want to vote! We’re building a way for you to vote that’s separate from the independent votes you see arriving on the site right now.