Facebook recently started offering a new “Polls” service. The offering, very straight forward:

• You create a “one question” poll with up to 5 possible answers.
• You can target the sample by location, interest, age and sex.

• Here comes the interesting part. You can then select how much you want to pay per response. The higher you bid, the faster you get your results.
• Finally, you choose the sample size (maximum is 1,000).

• You enter your credit card details… and voilá! Your survey is running.

How do they get the responses?

Well, let’s not forget that Facebook has over 30,000,000 registered users all over the world. Most of which check their Facebook homepage several times a day. So Facebook randomly shows the question on your homepage, once you reply you get to see the results so far.

Why is this scary?

Well, although the complexity of the surveys you can create is still very very basic… nothing could stop Facebook from offering a more professional solution. It’s simple, fast, and cheap. Access to 30,000,000 plus people around the world, very quick, with no intermediaries.

Breathe. Kind of.
It’s clear however that Facebook’s universe is highly skewed and biased towards young college students so not sure it’s the best way to interview 25+ people. But for college and high school students… I really can’t think of any better.

So?

So, as an industry, we should pay attention to this and learn. We have to offer solutions that are quicker, simpler, more economic and more in sync with the new web 2.0 landscape. Looking forward to see how it develops…