Twitter goes polling; But is the new feature good or bad?

The micro blogging site Twitter has decided to add a new feature for its users in form of “Polls”. Yeah you read it right, now all the tweeters out there can add some spice to their 140 character chirping.

This is a feature trial for the twitter mobile and desktop app; where it was introduced to a selected group of users. This has become a common practice for a lot of on-line social media companies. Whenever they wish to add something new as a feature to their websites or domains, they run a trial based experiment for a selected audience.

Regarding the twitter polls, the feature is embedded in the tweet itself. That means, when a user is constructing a tweet, they can chose to go for creating a poll regarding that same tweet. However, this is not compatible with third-party apps or clients such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

As seen here in this tweet, besides asking for the location and media, twitter is now giving the option for the polls.

Twitter has confirmed about this experiment but has not stated if this feature would be available for all its users. So, far the experiment has gathered positive feedback.

All users can participate in the polls, but it seems that a fewer can create them. The polls have a life span of 24 hours. But during this time, the tweeters are informed about; how many votes have been cast, and how much time is left for polls. This seems to be very interesting as in Pakistan, the social media covers almost all aspects of life. Political, social, educational, religious and simple media domains can make use of this feature.

The feature is already getting a lot of popularity as the activity around the “Polled” tweets seems to be getting a lot of re-tweet.

Here is another example;

However, what people poll about is something not for twitter to decide.

There are complaints as well; however, these complaints relate to the lack of third party integration and the tweets showing on the timelines as text questions when the allotted time to poll is finished.

By the way, this is not the first time that twitter has conducted such experiment regarding polls.

Last year in 2014, the tweeters were given a chance to vote on Oscars favorites. This poll was provided by Poptip. However, this feature was only available for the mobile apps. In addition to this, twitter’s own @support account has also made use of the polls regarding the user feedbacks.

Source: The Guardian

Image: whatsnew dot com