iRadar: iVoted – Not Just An Opinion Poll But An Audience Response System

Friday, November 19, 2010

iVoted – Not Just An Opinion Poll But An Audience Response System

iVoted – Not Just An Opinion Poll But An Audience Response System: "

opinion polls Polls are everywhere around the internet. We here at MakeUseOf use PollDaddy for our reader polls and it works great for us. But what if we want to expand our surveys beyond the Internet?

iVoted bills itself as an “Audience Response System“. It differs itself from other polling software by allowing users to respond to a question via a number of digital venues:

Web poll.
Twitter mention via @ivoted.
A text message to 41411.
An email message to vote@ivoted.com.

Creating an opinion poll is easy, you simply type in your question and answers:

opinion polls

After you type in the answer, a unique “keyword” is generated for the responses. In the above example the keywords are P0EIXE and P1WOOZ. In the free version of the software these keywords are generated at random for you and there is also a limitation of 30 responses. When you upgrade to the paid plans, the number of people who are allowed to respond are increased (depending on the plan) and you can also customize keywords. For example, I might have chosen MUOYES and MUONO as my keywords.

After your results start rolling in, you will see results instantly (no need to refresh the site!)

online poll

Using iVoted is a good way to get a multi-platform response system in place with almost no hassle at all. The main differentiator between iVoted and other systems I am familiar with, is that you are able to submit votes via SMS, Twitter and email in addition to the standard web poll.

To submit a vote via Twitter, you message your keyword and mention @ivoted. To send it in via email, put the keyword in the subject line and mail it to vote@ivoted.com. The web link is sadly just a link, you cannot embed the poll into a webpage as far as I could tell. This would seem to be a major feature that people would want from a polling website and I would hope they add to their service soon.

opinion polls

I did run into a couple of problems, which are indicative of the ‘beta’ nature of this service.

The first was that one of my keywords was not working via SMS. Via the web it seemed to work fine, but this could really skew results if you are depending on SMS results. Also of note the SMS functionality only works in the US – it does not work with international carriers.

The second was that when I went back to edit my poll, it truncated my text after a single quote (‘). This is a problem with the code, because in the process of making the code safe from SQL injection they are mangling the actual string.

All that being said, iVoted is a decent free option for small surveys where you need multiple responses coming in from non-web sources. An alternative to iVoted is Polleverywhere which has pretty much the same functionality and prices.

I would say the main differentiator between the two is that iVotes is a “dead simple” setup while Polleverywhere has more features and other options which you can tweak based on your needs. Which website would be best for you depends on the features you need for your opinion poll.

You can participate in the poll I created for this post!

What do you think of iVoted?

Vote P0EIXE for I like it a lot.
Vote P1WOOZ for It doesn’t do anything for me.

- Mobile Text Message: Text the keyword that matches your choice to 41411
- Twitter: type the keyword that matches your choice followed by @ivoted
- Web: Go to http://ivoted.com/vote/poll/429
- Email: Email vote@ivoted.com, with the keyword that matches your choice on the Subject Line.

Like (or dislike) iVoted? Do you have an alternative you swear by? Let us know in the comments!

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