Can you do a good opinion survey for free? No, it turns out, but it's interesting to look at a site that's taking baby steps in that direction. If you stand on that spot and squint, you can see what the future might look like.
"In minutes instead of days"
Ask500People.com explains itself this way:
In 2004 James Surowiecki wrote a best-selling book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." The book's premise is that diverse, decentralized people voting independently are better at predicting future events or trends than individuals, small groups or even domain experts.
There are tools for surveying groups of independent voters, but they're either slow, expensive or both. We built Ask500People to gather input and opinion data in minutes instead of days, and to create a platform that other applications can integrate.
It doesn't substitute for a true poll -- at least not at the free level that I was exploring, and probably not at the "premium" level they offer. At the free level, you get to ask 100 people, not 500. The site puts your question on a network of websites, although it doesn't tell you which ones:
When a question goes live on the network, over 75,000 websites display that poll. This network reach allows us to deliver voting results in real-time.
Would you fire your boss?
I tried it with a question Gallup asked in September: "If you could fire your current boss, would you do so or not?" In Gallup's results, 24% of people said yes and 76% said no, although the numbers shifted for "disengaged" workers:
Just 6% of engaged workers say they would fire their boss if they had the chance, while 51% of actively disengaged associates would get rid of their leader if they could.
The 100 people who saw my question on Ask500People.com's websites must have been disengaged. The question took around five hours to float to the top of the pile and only a few minutes more to collect 100 answers: 46 people would fire their boss and 54 wouldn't. More than half the answers were from the U.S., and the rest were from people all over the world: someone in Parow, South Africa, who would keep the boss, one in Makati, Phillipines, who was in dismissal mode, and so on.
Regular or premium?
In the premium version, you can get up to 500 answers, at $150 for worldwide responses and $225 for responses limited to one country. You're not limited to yes or no questions; you can choose multiple choice or a sliding scale. And when you pay for premium, Ask500People.com promises to keep you anonymous.
It will never be Gallup, though, mostly because the respondents are all people who are sitting in front of a computer when your question happens by. That's a lot of people, but it's not a cross-section. If you want to know what logo your new dot-com company should use, you might want to ask this group; if you want to know what your jury pool thinks, you'll never get more than a partial answer.
Does God exist?
Take it less seriously, though, and the site becomes fascinating, for the questions people ask as well as the answers they give. Samples from the other night:
Are you a racist? 83% no, 17% yes
Do you know where Morocco is? 76% yes, 24% no
Does God exist? 72% yes, 28% no
Some of the questions give a sense of the demographics of the group:
What is your age? 24% under 18, 27% between 18 and 30, 30% between 30 and 40, 19% over 50 (it looks like 40-50 wasn't offered as a choice)
Are you a democrat or republican? 33% Republican, 67% Democrat
The future?
What's even more fascinating is to picture this technology in ten years, or four, or one. Wikipedia's current article on Facebook says that social network has 49 million users, with 4 million new people arriving every month. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal report that older people are joining Facebook in droves, to the dismay of some of the college students who used to have it to themselves. Meanwhile developers are testing all kinds of ways to link and communicate among different social networks on the Web.
So surely we're heading for a level of demographic diversity in large social networks that would come closer to that of a jury pool. And we now know it's possible to float a survey question to a network, privately, and get answers quickly. As the Internet evolves and takes us with it, it will be interesting to see whether polling changes, and how.
