Categorie: Polls

It happens to the best of entrepreneurs, that service, app or site that you set up finds an audience that totally blows your mind. You thought that a certain set of people would flock to your app like crazy, and you’re surprised by who actually uses it. If you have this “problem”, it’s important to recognize that it’s not a problem at all. One of the most interesting apps that is quietly picking up steam, heavy usage and a wide-ranging audience, Polar for iOS, has done some interesting things to best serve all of its users, and not freak out about it being “overrun by kids”, much like Instagram has been. If you’re not sold on Instagram being an app for the younger set, just take a look at the most popular pictures section, and you’ll get the gist quickly. Polar, which is a social voting app of sorts, acts much like hot-or-not does, slurping up the things that you are interested in based on your quick-fire voting. It’s a gorgeous app, easy to use and is kind of fun once you get into the groove of using it. Polar’s co-founder Luke Wroblewski, a self-professed data nerd, told me about how his company is making Polar a place to be for everyone, no matter what their interests are or what their age is. Needless to say, Polar saw its highest usage ever during the holidays, since a lot of people were getting their new iOS devices. It’s a good sign that there’s word of mouth going on for Polar, which is hard to get away from once your friends are tweeting and Facebooking polls. Wroblewski told me that New Year’s Eve had the highest number of polls created in one day, mostly centered on “best of 2012″ themes. The app has registered over 2M votes thus far. There goes the neighborhood? Teens like to use Polar, it’s obvious as you poke around. You’ll see questions like “Who is your favorite Twilight character?”, and I usually just skip over them. Wroblewski feels like that’s a bad user experience for older crowds, so the company is doing something about it. What Polar has done is created two versions of its popular and news feed sections, and there’s one with polls that don’t mention things like Justin Bieber, “who is cuter?” and things of that nature. By creating a simple corpus of keywords,