Rob Goodlatte

Today I’m pleased to introduce StrawPoll, a tiny polling application for Twitter. The premise is simple: each day, we ask an interesting question. Reply to strawpoll and tell us why you voted the way you did. StrawPoll tallies the votes and displays the most recent reasons for each response. To get started, all you need to do is sign into Twitter and start following strawpoll.

For example, today’s question is “Better superpower: flight (1) or invisibility (2)?”. To answer, simply reply to @strawpoll with a message like:

@strawpoll flight because you could travel anywhere for free

That is, your reply must be formatted like “@strawpoll <vote> <reason>”, where is one word or number, and your reason can be as long as you’d like (less than 140 characters of course).

The application was designed and developed by myself and Dan Romero over this past weekend. For those interested, some of the illustrations were created by John Woodcock for iStockPhoto. The site only works in modern browsers that support transparent PNGs and Javascript (that means no IE6!).

Check it out at StrawPollNow.com and be sure to follow strawpoll on Twitter.

 

1. Riddle February 21st at 11:36 am

   Fantastic design Rob, GJ. It’s interesting that more and more people go for these amazing fixed backgrounds. :)

2. Bram.us » StrawPoll : Polls on Twitter February 21st at 12:11 pm

   […] a tiny polling application for Twitter. Info and site. (via) Spread the […]

3. Sam Rayner February 21st at 12:41 pm

   Really fun idea Rob, nice one. Love the design, especially the fixed footer.

4. Dave Jeffery February 21st at 3:41 pm

   Love it, great idea and a very cute implementation!

5. Alex Mather February 21st at 7:01 pm

   As usual, awesome work Rob. Congrats on the Mashable writeup.

6. Rob Goodlatte February 21st at 7:19 pm

   Thanks everyone!

   Alex—Wow, I didn’t even see the Mashable post until you pointed it out. That’s huge!

7. Lee February 22nd at 4:12 am

   Good on you for sticking it to IE users, there’s just no excuse anymore and it’s about time we all started dragging our feet.

   I’ve also been working on a twitter app in my increasingly rare spare time however I don’t have the balls to snub IE6 users. I’m justifying this by my stats - I run another site with a similar target audience, and nearly 70% of them stubbornly refuse to upgrade.

   I still loath every second I waste messing around a) on a windows box b) trying to get IE to do something even remotely like it should do.

   I will be leaving subtle pointers for these stubborn people though. I really can’t understand why you would subject yourself to such an inferior browsing experience, and severely inconvenience poor web designers / developers in the process.

   Cool app btw! Looking forward to tomorrows poll :)

8. Amanda March 4th at 11:38 am

   OK… so first off, I have to say that I love Strawpoll. I look forward to it every day, but I recently found out that you have to reply to the poll within, I’m guessing, 12 hours or else the vote isn’t recorded properly.

   Now I look like an idiot b/c my post for yesterday’s poll showed up on today’s poll… for the WRONG person!

   Please put the “rules” about when you have to post on your site please.

   Thanks.

9. Jessica C. March 12th at 7:39 pm

   I’m glad that you didn’t bother designing for IE6, but not IE7? Even though we don’t like it, the simple fact of life is that a ton of people still use IE. I was sad when I switched browsers to check out your site and saw some alignment issues with the main content area. Without even a mention of “this site best viewed in firefox” users may not realize its their browser, but rather a fault of the developers for the display issues.

10. Matthijs March 14th at 4:41 pm

    I love it, but why can’t you see the polls of the days before, now there are the first 4 polls, not the latest 4

11. Jared March 20th at 12:15 pm

    What a great design! Every aspect of it just comes together. Of course, the day I decide to follow, it asks if Coke or Pepsi is better. What if you hate all soda?

12. D. April 5th at 1:38 pm

    I like strawpoll when following it on twitter, but I logged in and tried to use it on my own twitter and my poll didn’t post. There’s no way to get any help on the site either. It just asks for another poll to post.

 

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