Sodahead’s social polling looks promising

By Vivek | March 12th, 2007 at 12:44 pm ET         

Sodahead went ahead with the public launch of its social polling platform last week. From the initial looks I think Sodahead can turn be pretty addictive site. Idea is not new but comes with a twist as compared to what we already have in market. Vizu does distributed polling and surveys, while Grouptivity and CircleUp enable group collaboration and questionnaires in private groups. But none of these work out in the open where users in a social network can put up polls and get responses and comments from everyone on the community. Identifying this sweet spot can only come from experienced social networking guys. As it turns out Sodahead was founded last year by former MySpace execs Jason Feffer and Michael Glazer. To start with Sodahead had received $4.25 million in funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures, a big enough round to keep their small but smart group up and running for a while.

Getting around Sodahead is pretty straightforward. You can browse through relevant poll categories ranging from Technology to Family to Music…….. to quickly find interesting polls and discussions taking place. I can already see quite a few lengthy discussions going with active participation from the community members. Again lot of focus is on pushing the top movers to the front page. You can get to the users with max raves and top Vote-getters from the Sodaheads page and to drill down a bit further browse through Sodaheads by categories. From the feature perspective adding people to your network, commenting, profile, blogging support, faves, commenting are all part of the game.

However Sodahead team seems to believe in the MySpace type UI principles. At best all I can say is that Sodahead’s interface is below average, which can put off quite a few users in my opinion. On the contrary, MySpace and Orkut have already proved that getting the community effect rolling is what matters. Even though people might hate the UI, but they become oblivious of the not so great UI over time.

Links:
Sodahead