Is it okay to scrape your friends email addresses off Facebook? Poll by SodaHead
SodaHead is one of many companies that offers a polling widget that you can embed on a blog or social network. Others include Polldaddy, Pollection, JS-Kit, Vizu, and others. But Sodahead differentiates itself by being “social.” It pairs polls with social features such as discussion forums and Myspace-style user profiles, so users can both vote and discuss the issue presented in the poll, and do things like comment on each others’ profiles.
To demonstrate, here’s a poll with a hot question of the day in the tech blogosphere. Should you, as blogger Robert Scoble thinks, be able to use third-party service Plaxo to remove information from Facebook friends’ email addresses from their profiles (our coverage)? I agree that you should — after all, if somebody both Facebook-friends you and displays their email address on their profile, they are literally sharing it with you already. Not everyone agrees — so, if you want to talk about the issue more, use Sodahead’s forum that comes with this poll.
Back to Sodahead, the company. It launched four months ago, and has gained the most traction, it tells us, with musicians and their fans on Myspace. Many artists and managers are looking for new ways to interact with their large Myspace fan bases. Popular acts that use Sodahead include Plain White T’s, My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold. Others include include Pajamas Media, Hilary Clinton campaigners, OK Magazine, college newspapers and others.
The Los Angeles-based company reports 300,000 total unique visitors and 2.4 million total page views. It says it has done basically no public relations work, received no press coverage, forged no partnerships and only limited advertising.
Sodahead was founded by Jason Feffer, a former vice president of operations and founding member at Myspace, and Michael Glazer, a former senior vice president of technology at investment bank Jefferies.
It has raised $4.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, angel group Tech Coast Angels and prolific angel investor Ron Conway.
Source: VentureBeat