Google polls, coding horror.

Stop sharing excel spreadsheets to make a poll, get some feedback!

See here

Stack Overflow Beta is using to create a signup spreadsheet, but this has so many applications. For one - it's an instant email is.gd within the office polling system. It negates the whole, send me back the spreadsheet, then pass it on to the next person problem that online email petitions have. Add your names, add a tally on a website page, you're done.

It's simple.

*Instant poll
*Instant mailing list
*It can be quant or qualative
*You can hide or display results
*Free

As an aside - I think we need a stackoverflow macrumors sub section.... I wonder how it'll cope out of beta - will it's singal to noise ratio deteriorate? Will it cruft up from the range of questions?
It sounds like they're wanting objective questions with non-subjective answers which is a start, and their search is being reported to be good.

Should there be tools that are early adopters only, and sod the guld leap to the other side, and forget about bringing in the late adopters?

Maybe the world of mind mapping should come to blogs - to actually throw threads as THREADS - that can be teased, moved, spun off to pardon the pun. How to visually create this is a coding horror in itself i'd imagine... Wiki style editing of answers and comments and tags, with karme related skills to do this.

Totally cool progression of the area by the sounds of it. Turning answers to questions more into "live encyclopedia" entries. For the majority of users of the service, it might be just to read the answer, from googling the question and hitting the site. Interestingly, it has the potential to do what Yahoo questinos etc fails to do in many ways.

All sorts of cool developments: https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?pg=pgWiki&command=view&ixWikiPage=24213
The reputation and badging system has had a good deal of thought from a social point of view too. And in a way, it's hands off too, it's an evolving ecosystem and creating it's own social and codified self-correcting check systems. Feedback loops etc.

"...the only way you ever get reputation is from other people voting your stuff up"

Looks good. Really should chow down into wikinomics, but Clay Shirky's Here come Everbody has a lot to live up to.

ow mature enough and ubiquitous enough and fast enough to be a viable client programming runtime and teh API libraries are there too

They ahve a site where users can actually probe the system, get meaningful information about usage, numbers of users regularly doing things etc, beyond just activity and post count of a user - to actualyl show their voting history, their badges etc.

Interesting to show they're potentially looking at both what's hot - what's most activity, r/w, but also what's most in need - kinda like the p2p tracker webste version of what's got most leechers, but no seeds. A post moving to a community post after a level of editing.

Do they need a forum break out system?

An interesting point that i'd imagine Scoble would pick up on:
"...world became Microsoft and Oracle and they were like the 30,000 person software companies and then there were a couple of half a person trying to struggle to do it in their spare time. But he wasn't noticing any of the 40 person software companies and over the years I've discovered quite a lot of 40 person software companies, it's just a huge number of them, they're all a little bit below the radar, you don't hear about them. The business press doesn't write about them because they're not public companies and so they have no interest in covering things whose stock you can't buy. But there are really like an outlandish number of software companies around our size."