Migrating to Google's High Replication Datastore

Our engineers just recently migrated our datastore to Google´s HRD (High Replication Datastore). The change brings more stability to the already mighty cloud infrastructure.

If you have any problems, feel free to report them to us

Decodificado Sondeos con Pieall

La ley de Metcalfe indica que el valor de una red es proporcional al cuadrado de sus usuarios. En Pieall pensamos que el valor de la red de opinión es proporcional a como todos los sondeos están relacionados. Al final todo está relacionado por los votos entre un sondeo y otro. Orientados en este esfuerzo proponemos el concepto de "cross polling".

Cross Polling
Pieall ofrece nuevas herramientas para poder encontrar como están relacionados los votos entre todos los sondeos públicos. Nuestro sistema permite escoger un sondeo raiz y compararlo contra otros sondeos. Aquellos votos que provengan de las misma persona (basado en el IP) podrán compararse para encontrar tendencias. Pero todo es mejor explicarlo con un ejemplo.

Ejemplo de Cross Polling
Empecemos con un sondeo de opinión:

¿Qué sistema operativo para móvil usas?
a.) iPhone
b.) Android
c.) Blackberry

Y supongamos que existe otro sondeo relacionado ya que los mismos usuarios que votaron en el primer sondeo también votaron en el siguiente:

¿Cúal es tu actividad favorita en tu smartphone?
a.) surfear la web
b.) juegos
c.) revisar mi correo

La siguiente imagen es más explicativa

La nueva función permite contrastar quienes seleccionaron iPhone y saber cuantos usan (a) internet, (b) juegos y (c) revisar correo.

Si estás interesado en usar esta funcionalidad envíanos un email: info@pieall.com

Pieall Increases Answer Choices for Polls

Now you can have up to 10 answer choices for your polls.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

And as always, feel free to ask if you would like new functions

The Pie "All-Stars"

Over the last year, there have been some polls that have made it all the way to the top of the Google search results. We would like to honor these polls today, as they continue to be on top of the result lists from Google:

(In order to validate our claim, just do a search for the terms in Google)

In English,

• "armstrong cheated": PieAll poll
  

In Spanish,

• "pp mayoria absoluta": PieAll poll

And one of the favorites terms thus far related to PieAll:

• "embed poll"

Give it a try and let us know what do you think.

Pieall Analytics

We are currently in the works for enhancing our data analysis features in Pieall. Pretty soon, authors of Pieall polls will be able to get one of the strongest data reporting features of the market.

One of the key features that we are pushing is the concept of the Pieall Graph (PG). The idea is to correlate the choices selected accross different Pieall polls. For example, if there are two polls: one that asks for your favorite beverage and another that asks for your favorite day for doing the groceries. You, as a registered user of Pieall, will be able to correlate the results and discover how many of the users who selected coke also do their groceries on Sunday. Pretty cool!

Another area that we are enhancing is the collection of certain metrics regarding the performance of your Pieall poll. For example, think of having a statistic for total votes per day, total votes per hour or total votes per month. Also think of having a similar stats for times your poll was shared in Facebook or times emailed to friends (or emailed to the world by a third party).

If you have any suggestions to make, please sends us an email (info@pieall.com) or write a comment.

Pieall or die!

Article in the News

A review by the Spanish newspaper cincodias

http://www.cincodias.com/articulo/sentidos/mide-opinion-red/20110614cdscdscis_2/

Domain Setup

A new change implemented today will allow users to visit Pieall from both: http://pieall.com and http://www.pieall.com

In case you have experienced a short interruption of service, we wanted to let you know that everything is back to normal.

If you have any questions, please feel free to write: info@pieall.com

New Features: Disabling Polls

We have just released a new feature for pieall that allow users to disable a poll. The difference with deleting a poll is that by disabling you can re-activate the poll at a later time.

Polls that are disabled are not shown in the categories or in any listing.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop us a line: info@pieall.com

Our Growing Audience

Back when we launched Pieall in Feb. 17th, we did not expect the amount of traffic that was going to generate and the international dimension that was going to receive. Today, March 19th, we have more than 2,227 visits to our site, have collected 2,134 votes, and users have created 163 polls since that initial day.

In what respect to languages, we have been visited in 45 different languages. Although we currently support English and Spanish we are expecting to expand to French and Portuguese in the near future.

Our visitors come from 69 different countries. From those countries, Spain takes the lead with more than a thousand visits. On second place and growing is the USA followed very closely by France. Germany is also raising on a fourth place.

As we are approaching our M4 release (milestone 4), this gives us more energy and motivation to continue to enhance our product and we would like to thank you all for making this contribution.

Improved Embedded Polls

We have just released new features for our embedded polls. Now users have two options regarding the size of the chart. A small chart, that is intended to economize space by locating the legends in an horizontal position. And a large chart, that is the current size of the Pieall poll site.

Additionally we have included an option to show the number of votes collected or not. This feature is intended for those sites who would like to hide the total amount of votes so as not influencing voters.

Under the hood, we also optimized the front page. Now the charts are loaded in parallel, thus increasing the speed of the load page. We also improved the speed of the quickvote, now takes less CPU.

If you would like to add any feature, sends us an email:

info@pieall.com

Tendencies Week Mar 6 - 12th 2011

Today we start a weekly review on the latest tendencies of our polls in pieall. The idea is to summarize the latest trends and highlight the most interesting polls. The most popular poll for a second week in a row is political. It deals with US foreign policy. On the technology side, there is an interesting thread about privacy and social networks. If you answer negatively to any of the polls, you might be in trouble. If you haven't decided if you are a Rolling or Beatle's fan, then you are missing the most voted poll of the week. And finally, one of the most interesting polls deals with pieallers Sunday routines. Take a look, you'll be surprise what people like to do.

Crowdsourcing: Mass collaboration

A key difference between Pieall and the standard poll system is the way people contribute to the poll. People reading and voting your poll may not be in your proximity or speak your same language. Pieallers may be taking a poll while you sleep and sleeping while you are at work. This diversity is what makes the Pieall poll system special: everybody is contributing to your idea!

Yes, we love crowdsourcing.

Of course, you always have the option of going private. In that mode, only people to whom you sent the link will be able to find your poll.

Whatever you choose, let us know what you think.

First Embedded Poll: Pola

Pola is a software application written in java that allows people to modify their pictures so that they look like they have been taken from a polaroid camera -- among other features. They decided to create a Pieall poll to see how many people would be willing to collaborate if the project was open sourced. We are happy to see how well the poll can be embedded in an existing site.

Thanks very much to the Pola guys who gave it a try and gave us many ideas about improving our embedded features.

We believe in Pie Charts

There have been several questions regarding the use of charts for displaying poll results. We would like to explain our choice because it is really important.

We believe pie charts are better to display poll results in the web than bar charts. In a pie chart you can always guarantee the spce that is going to be used: the area will never grow more than 2*pie*square.

Humans are better at understanding proportions by using a circle. Think of a wrist watch. The analog display is better in conveying the time consumed. A digital display showing only 7:46pm says very little.

When we thought about Pieall, we imagined a chart that could be portable to almost any medium without loosing context or proportion. But this is us, tell us what you think?

Pieall Polls in Facebook

We just listed our Pieall in the Facebook App Directory.

Take a look at it:

http://apps.facebook.com/mypieall/

New Group in Linkedin

We are glad to announce the creation of our Pieall group in Linkedin.

If you have any problems signing up let us know info@pieall.com .

Releasing Private Polls

Due to popular demand, we are getting ready to release a new version of Pieall with an option for private polls. Polls labeled private are not shown on the category listings or the index page. Only people that are selected on the "sharing" form are notified of the existence of the poll.

You can keep track of your polls, private and public, in the mypolls page.

Thanks to don Alessandro, who pulled an all nighter to get this feature going.

Let us know what you think at info@pieall.com

Meta-tags

We are excited to re-discover our users patterns everyday. We are currently changing the way our meta-tags are defined in order to bring more relevance to our user’s public polls. Users are creating highly relevant content that we believe should be updated on the search engines daily. We are planning to include better descriptions meta-tags hoping that this change will increase the page rank of the polls created in Piall.com.

As always, let us know what do you think at info@pieall.com

Support for "likes" in Facebook

We are testing our support for "likes" in Facebook. With this feature, whoever visits your poll can post in Facebook a link to your poll indicating that he or she likes your poll.

Send your comments to info@pieall.com

Happy piealling!

Chat Support

We are currently working on releasing support for chat support. This new feature will allow messages to be sent to all those who have commented in a poll, whenever an event arises. The event that we are listening is the addition of a comment. In other words, whenever somebody writes a comment, a chat message to your google talk will be send.

Please note that an email message is also send to the destinatary.

This feature only works for those comments registered under an user. Anonymous comments will not receive any messages because we don't know where to send it.

Please tells us what you think!

love,
Pieall Development Team