A Website

Instead of doing something productive yesterday, I decided to mess around with the Twitter API some. The result of that is a little time-waster I call EZPoll.

What does it do? Well, for one it will prove me right in my ongoing debate with Brian Hamman, who is dead wrong about people who work with computers. They should not hesitate to discuss their love of science fiction.

But less importantly, EZPoll is a dead simple service that will allow you to create a simple user poll on Twitter. For now, I am the only one who can create an EZPoll. But once I make sure this all works as expected, and add a bit of error handling, I'll open it to everyone.

How does it work? Like I said, it's dead simple.

To register with EZPoll (when I open it up to everyone), you simply send a tweet to the @ezpoll user account, like this:

@ezpoll register

That's it. EZPoll will pick up the request and log your Twitter user name. Within a couple of minutes, and reply back to you when your account is ready to go. No fuss. No muss.

To create an EZPoll, you simply need to send a tweet to the @ezpoll user with the hash tag you would like to use and the poll question. Like this:

@ezpoll #myfirstpoll Q Should computer programmers talk about science fiction?

Again, within a few minutes EZPoll will pick up the request, and will open the poll. To vote, all a user needs to do is reply to you with the hash tag followed with a "yes" or "no" somewhere in their reply, like this:

@pilhofer #myfirstpoll yes of course they should!

The votes will be tallied every few minutes and the results will be updated in the polls section of this website. (Each registered user will see a list of his or her own polls.)

For now, poll questions are limited to "yes" and "no" responses. Anything EZPoll cannot understand as a vote will be categorized as a hanging chad. Users are restricted to one vote per poll, and each active poll has to have a unique hash tag for that user.

In other words, I can use #myfirstpoll more than once, but I can only have one #myfirstpoll open at at a time (otherwise EZPoll gets confused). Multiple users can have open polls using the same hash tag (that does not confuse EZPoll at all).

In the unlikely event that people start using EZPoll, I will add more options to it, like customized responses and configurable poll durations (right now, they default to 24 hours).