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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Moralize.us: if YouTube commenters ruled the world ...

Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.

For example, someone asked "is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?" The responses ranged from "Right: he's fat" to "Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore." This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful -- because hey, they're at zero now, and it can only get better.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Polls Boutique: Free web-based polling service

Polls Boutique

Polls Boutique is a new web service that aims to answer the age-olf question: Is there room in this town for two easy to use online polling services? Because much like PollDaddy, that's exactly what Polls Boutique offers.

But unlike PollDaddy, Polls Boutique makes it easy to add multimedia to your polls. You can add images, audio, or video clips. You can write introductions to your polls and inlcude hyperlinks. And you can share your polls with others either through the Polls Boutique web site, or through a widget that you can embed on any web page. You can view the results of your poll at the Polls Boutique site, complete with some basic demographic info, since anyone who signs up for Polls Boutique needs to give up their location, gender and age. You do not necessarily need to sign up for an account to vote in polls, but you do need an account to create one.

Check out a sample Polls Boutique poll after the jump.

Read more →

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

PollDaddy adds Twitter polling feature

PollDaddy Twitter
Looking for a quick way to conduct a poll? Online polling service PollDaddy has added a new Twitter feature that lets you ask a group of people what you should have for lunch, who you should vote for, or anything in between.

Users can set up a poll in a matter of seconds. Just visit the web site, type a short question, and select a few possible answers. You'll need to enter your Twitter login information in order to send out the poll. PollDaddy will automatically shorten the URL and send out a tweet under your name.

We're guessing that most users will either see your poll the moment you post it or they won't see it at all, so this service will be great for Twitter users with a large number of followers who need to get some information quickly. But you can also post links to your poll on a web page or pretty much anywhere else, so you could theoretically use PollDaddy's Twitter feature to gather information over time as well.

[via WebWare]

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Obama most popular with tech savvy voters

As you may know, the New Hampshire primary for the US 2008 Presidential election is today. Although web 2.0 itself has not been positioned as a major campaign issue, the power of the web and social networks has played a large role in not only individual candidate campaigns, but in the debate process itself. Additionally, with his victory in the Iowa caucus, Democratic candidate Barack Obama has become the first candidate leading in Internet metrics to pull off a major victory. So this begs the question, are Obama's fans the most savvy and "connected" supporters? Well, in addition to having the most friends on MySpace and supporters on Facebook, Sen. Obama is also leading in the war of campaign widgets.

According to Widgetbox, a major distributed widget marketplace, Obama has nearly double the number of widget impressions as his nearest opponent. In fact, he has almost as many impressions as his two nearest competitors combined! These widgets are embedded on personal web pages, blogs and social networking sites. This certainly gives additional (if ancillary) credence to the idea that Obama is the most plugged-in candidate.

Widget Impressions from Widgetbox Widgets

What effect, if any will the candidates online popularity have on the polls? Keep checking the news, and DownloadSquad, to find out!

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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