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Netvoting: Social Voting/Poll Service (paid!)

This is a paid posting, powered by trigami Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

This review has been waiting a long time inside my drafts folder. Mainly for two reasons: I simply had not that much time to write a good review and because their service is not yet fully available in English.
And this is something I have noticed on many websites in the last time: An American Startup launches their service in English (ofcourse) and takes a long time to translate it to German, French or Italian. They are not very interested in the non-English market. The same of course goes for German startups. But they have one problem: The English market is much bigger than the German. And if you put some country flags on your website, at least link them to a page that gives a schedule on when the translation will be ready.
Because this is what the signup pages looks like right now:

netvoting_1196278144703.png

You can see all the missing translations.

Because of the lack of translations I have reviewed the German part – please excuse the German screen shots. Hopefully the English part will follow soon and give you the chance to try it on your own.

So, what is Netvoting?
Netvoting is a “web 2.0” voting platform. They name their features as followed (my translation):

  • create votings, share and participate in other’s votings
  • style your votings and include them to MySpace, Facebook, blogs and many more
  • create voting widgets from any voting on NetVoting and include it to your page or profile site
  • 1-click integration tool for votings for blogs, websites and profile pages
  • classical social-networking features such as friends, groups, mailing and much more

They also say they want to “collect and reflect the user’s opinion and display them on their website”.

Creating a Voting

netvoting_1196279399421.png

Demo
For a little demo I have added a poll below.

There is also a Flash version available:

Or the direct link to the voting:
http://netvoting.com/de/which-social-networks-do-you-use

Please feel free to try it out, select any answer you like and take a look at the results. I had for example a weird result:

netvoting-result.pngnetvoting-result2.png



It was even possible to vote several times. So their user blocking with cookies is not really working.

I have used the default formatting and haven’t created my own style sheet. And I haven’t found any documentation on how my style sheet should look like.

The widget they offer looks the same as the Javascript include above, but allows you to display other votings on your website. Or display all votings for a specified topic.

Conclusion
First of all, I am very skeptical to any new service that tries to bring “Web 2.0” features to something Web 1.0 like. And this is exactly what Netvoting is trying to do. And they are not doing it well. I haven’t built a social network in Netvoting because I just don’t need it. And I don’t think I will use their service in the feature. If I need a quick poll I can use any of the many WordPress Plugins out there or simply use doodle. And they have in now way lived up the “hype” they created before with the betatester-wanted.com website.
And I am not the only one thinking like that. In a voting on their blog, 20% said Netvoting “is simply bad”, 21% said “wtf?” and 24% are half happy with the service.

netvoting-voting-on-blog.png

Final notes
You wonder how they gonna make money? The same way Facebook will make money: Highly targeted advertisement. They collect data on you, what you like, what you don’t like and they ask you several times to update your profile.

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