Asking Big and Little Questions
Google Maps’s mashup site is simple, social, and satisfying.
Can you find Estonia on a world map? Do you sing in the shower? Criminals break the law; are they likely to follow gun laws? These are a few recent polls run on Ask500People, a Google Maps mashup that has a simple, satisfying purpose: to solicit people’s answers to a series of questions. The questions come from logged-in users, who also vote on which of the submitted questions they’re interested in answering. Anyone can vote, and the voting happens in real time, while the map collects the locations of responders. More details can be found here.
What strikes me about Ask500People is that, although every website these days touts its social features, I find few sites as purely, delightfully social as this one.