New Widget Easily Integrates Polls To Blogs And Websites

Opinion Stage, an Israeli startup that has given opinion surveys a social network makeover, has now launched a new widget. The new tool easily allows bloggers and site owners to integrate polls on their pages and encourage reader interaction.

“Our target is to create the best place for users to post opinions,” says Assaf Parag, founder and CEO. The platform is making progress toward this goal with their new widget: Each debate page now includes a “get code” button that gives users the embed code to add the poll widget to their website. The new and simple widget gives bloggers and website publishers a great way to engage readers.

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Opinion-based social networking

Parag and co-founder Gil Yoffe founded the startup in September 2011 and launched the Opinion Stage website at the end of that year.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wrxW4anxWM[/youtube]

“Last summer there were all these big demonstrations in Israel and all over the world. All these people would participate and go back home and express their opinions on social networks but in a very unstructured way. So you don’t know who supports what and why. This is how we came to Opinion Stage. We wanted to structure all these opinions that are out there,” explains Parag.

Users can connect to the site through Facebook and take part in polls or even create their own. Polls are shown with a small summary of the issue at hand and below appear comments left by voters; those rated as most relevant or interesting show up at the top of the list.

“We are different [from other survey services] because of our unique approach that stems from the fact that we are solely based on social networks,” says Parag. Opinion Stage aggregates each user’s activity into a profile that shows how they have voted and what comments they have posted to debates. Users can also choose to vote anonymously in debates, or conversely they publish their vote on their social media profile.

Opinion Stage is also interested in helping users find like-minded, or rather -opinionated, people. Through the website, users can find people they are interested in and see how they responded to different polls. A filter option exists to show users only the opinions of people they choose.

The two founders, who met working at Microsoft, have been largely self-funding the project and are now in the process of further fundraising.

Below is a survey we created, shown in widget form