Ask HN: Help Us Beta Test Our Real-Time Polling Widget

[BenSchaechter]

Hi HN,

We've been working hard on making GoPollGo extensible as widgets for people to use on websites and in blog posts. I'd really appreciate any and all feedback you could give us.

Here is a link to take a look at them: http://gopollgo.com/widget

[jjacobson]

This is taking embeddable polls to the next level. I like the ability to scroll through it and gather additional information like gender and age.

I saw that it's an iframe inside the JS. Is it possible to pass in styles to skin it for my site?

[BenSchaechter]

Thanks jjacobson,

Right now we're doing an iFrame because we wanted to get something out the door. The way we've built them is so that we can constantly update and polish the widget as issues arise. There is a possibility of it moving over to pure javascript at one point -- but not for the foreseeable future.

[porterhaney]

Ben - That is pretty nifty.

How configurable is the size and what elements are included?

For instance could you eliminate referring source from the embed statistics?

Also, any opportunity to remove GPG branding from this as a white label?

[BenSchaechter]

Thanks!

Right now we're targeted the size to fit the majority of most common blog platforms. We'll probably roll something out soon to pass in a param to get your own sizes. The problem is resizing the analytics gets tough.

We will probably have the ability to turn on/off certain reports pretty easily if its really requested.

We also plan to implement branding VERY soon. And we're going to give it away for free. Feel free to follow @GoPollGo on Twitter for relevant updates.

[jarcoal]

Looks great. The only thing that tripped me up is the lack of a scroll bar in the widget. Took me a minute to realize I could scroll up and down. That is on Chrome/Lion.

[BenSchaechter]

Thanks jarcoal,

We're planning on implementing a scroll bar -- we just don't really enjoy the default browser ones and are going to have a custom-built one soon in JavaScript.

[stc]

Very cool, love the visualizations. Is there a way to select multiple subgroups when looking through the data (such as 18-24 and 25-34) or to compare groups?

[BenSchaechter]

Sadly, there is no way to do this. We may roll this out in the future -- but you're the first person to bring it up. If we see a higher demand, we'll definitely consider it.

[BenSchaechter]

Clickable: http://gopollgo.com/widget