The social media world's news channel, Twitter, has just rolled out the ability to plant polls in tweets natively. At the meta level, the introduction of polls, running in trial mode right now, is Twitter's way to survey the Twitterverse on whether or not the new feature is a worthy addition to the social network.
For now, Twitter is only extending its trial of polling to staffers and select verified accounts. The polls are only available through Twitter's web interface and mobile apps, leaving out third-party services such as TweetDeck.
Those who have been blessed with the ability to poll will see a little pie chart, labeled "Poll," next to the "Location" button on the new tweet template. Aside from that conclusive evidence, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed the company's experimentation with polls.
"We're experimenting with a new way to poll users on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson confirmed.
Twitter has tinkered with native polling in the past, as businesses and brands were once able to use customer Twitter cards to survey followers. That effort faded away, and so might this one.
In its current iteration, there are a few problems with Twitter's new polling feature.
The first problem is the feature is only limited to two options, and that's an issue because many topics aren't black and white, yes or no, good or bad.
The second issue is the 24-hour time limit, although that short window to submit answers may actually fit into Twitter's strategy of facilitating news in real time much more so than a significantly longer polling period would. The 24-hour shot clock will let users know how much time is left before the buzzer sounds and the poll closes.
As mentioned earlier, the polling feature is native and doesn't support third-party integration. That's the third issue with the polls.
Right now, it's a bit of a hassle to find live polls as there's no seach filter set up for them just yet.
