Floq - A Survey Platform That Has Global, Open, And Shareable Answers

Floq is on a mission "to make all types of questions and answers global, open and shareable" says Jonah Cacioppe. The service has been in development for over a year with Jonah Cacioppe (co-founder and CEO), Michael Kruger (co-founder and CTO), Brinley Ang (developer), Rod Pattison (developer), Chris Cacioppe (designer), and David Jardine (marketing) making up the six person team. Floq is tied to, and partly owned by, Integral Development. ID is primarily owned by Dr. Ron Cacioppe and Jonah and is providing some of the workspace, infrastructure, as well as the initial pool of data.

Update, May 15, 2012, Floq has publicly launched! The core services now include team surveys, mobile customer feedback, and organizational surveys. Many enhancements and updates have been implemented to include QR codes, web embedding, social sharing, and PDF generation.

Floq's web application provides the ability to compare your group's survey results with other similar survey answers within the industry. Doing this provides a benchmark to strive for as well as deeper context to the respondents' answers. Questions and answers are anonymized with the questions being constantly compared to show you if your question has been asked before.

Imagine asking if a person prefers iOS or Android. While setting up your survey the autocomplete feature shows you that the question has been asked before. The previous results divulge that Android is selected more often overall, but the demographics of your team have not been asked. The answers you receive from your survey will benefit you as well as contribute to the community by providing more data for that question. Perhaps your small team prefers iOS but you see more people in general like Android. Another way this could benefit you is if you have a very small team to include their answers with a larger data set to receive a more accurate answer. This type of tool could be immensely beneficial.

Looking ahead they plan on integrating the Q&A with social networks to further expand the platform. A survey library will also be coming so that people can search a repository of pre-made survey templates that anyone can contribute to. The lessons learned and technology platform may also be used for other things such as ratings, polls, and tests.

Floq can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The user interface and design are very slick! It is in very early private beta testing and has some issues here and there that they are working on.

Google+ Questions Answered

I recently asked Joseph Smarr, a technical lead on the Google+ team, some questions I had. Below are the ones I asked and there are some more he answered on AnyAsq that you can read.

Will Google Buzz be merged or integrated with Google+?

I'm not involved in this directly, but here's the official response currently: Google+ won’t have any major impact on Buzz right now. Buzz users will still see a Buzz tab on their Google profile, and Buzz will continue working as it always has. Google+ users can also be Buzz users or can decide to just share their content using one of the products. Over time, we’ll determine what makes the most sense in terms of integrating the products.

Are their core groups of non-Google users you test early iterations on?

Not really, beyond bringing in non-Googlers to our usability lab to get early feedback on mock-ups/prototypes/etc. We mainly "dogfood" it internally with Googlers, but clearly with social products it's really important to use them in "the real world", so it's great to finally be in a public Field Trial, and we're learning and iterating in the open every day now.

Will Google+ integrate sharing posts externally via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

We do currently support this in YouTube, and many users do find it useful for reaching their audiences on other sites about their YouTube activity. I'm not sure if/when we'll do this in an automated way on Google+, but in the meantime, every post you make has a permalink (click on the timestamp next to your post) that you can share on external sites (and many people do).

Are updates release all the time, or do you roll out a once a week batch?

We try to do a full push (almost) every day, and we sometimes sneak in patch releases too if needed. But there are humans in the loop, it's not a "auto-push if all tests pass" situation or anything like that.