Neat Web 2.0: Ask500People

Today’s App is still in it’s beta phase (surprise), but has some interesting social networking implications (suprise), and a clean enough looking site that it’s next up for part 2 of our infinity part series: Neat Web 2.0 Stuff!

Ask500People.com is pretty simple, you sign up/log-in and well, you ask 500 people. Sounds lame? I thought so too- but the website had a look and usability that seemed smarter than the “lets make a buck” Web 2.0 model, so I decided to look into it.

Wondermill

Ask500People.com is brought to you by a company called Wondermill. The company is the product of one, Mr. Aaron Dragushan. Aaron (way easier to type than Dragusahsgabn), a net nerd from way back, started the company in 1998 on credit cards- which obviously put him in a considerable amount of debt. After getting pretty screwed by the trickle down from the Great Burst of 2000 (never forget), they kept trucking, reinvented their business model, and stayed nerdy. After years of ups ad downs, struggling with reinventing and solidifying their business model, keeping up with the pace of the net, and the money of their giant competitors, the company seems to be doing well, and the attitudes of those involved don’t seem to have changed much. Their website is actually overly personal. In other words- these seem like good people, and at the very least, they are people.

Ask500People.com

5 reasons I like this app:

1) Ease of use: way up there.

2) Registration is actually easy. Like, not that fake- give me all your information and I’ll spam you easy, but easy.

3) Questions are posted, then put into a community digg style board, where users can award points and watch certain questions climb up to the top of the list of questions to be asked next. (genius)

4) An interactive google-map style world map which pins where users voted from, with a color designating their vote.

5) The variety of polls has a good range, which covers pictures to 5 star ratings.

The website is intuitive, and clean looking, which is something really lacking from a lot of Web 2.0 out there today. There is also a social networking aspect involved in profiles, and “my polls” etc. which is pretty smart. You have the option to run your own poll outside of the general public polls, which is hosted on their site. They have a widget option which allows you to run a poll from your own site, which is less cool, and just looks like your boring everyday poll widget. It would be nice if they could figure out a way to cross some of their functionality between options.

The only serious downside to the site right now, and the thing that is going to determine its future viability unfortunately (and one thing that so many many Web 2.0 model forget) is the quality of its content. Another flaw here is its possible use by non-independents for all sorts of spamming related evils which many users are all to savvy to.

Overall this is a pretty cool site, which I recommend telling everyone about. If they can attract a good user base, and maybe cross over into a facebook app (and wordpress embedding!), I’d say they have the rare potential to stay a part of the Neat Web 2.0 model for years to come.