formspring.me

formspring.me.

I have been looking over several new, starting up, social websites. It’s no secret that the best way to get noticed, and the best way to promote oneself is using social networking these days. We all have a facebook, many of us have a facebook GROUP or a FANPAGE made for our blog/company/product and it works well to an extent. I’ve seen blog posts on web promotion recommending the use of stumbleupon, digg, and other popular bookmarking sites.

Here is an interesting new site. Formspring.me has made itself known to me a few months ago when my friends on facebook started posting links to their accounts.

What is it?

Formspring.me is a site wherein you create an account which can be addressed with questions either anonymously, or by another account. As the holder of an account, you can answer or delete questions. When you answer, your “stream” gets updated with the question and answer as well as the author (anonymous or otherwise).

There is an option to ask yourself a random question (those questions are obvious in the stream). There are several settings that allow twitter, tumblr, and facebook integration which adds to the general use.

Under the Hood:

From what I can tell, formspring.me is a really simple database-based website. The whole site works a lot like the comments section in most blogs. You add a comment (ie. the question), the comment shows up in the queue (ie. inbox) awaiting approval. And you can either accept (answer) or reject (delete) the comment (question).

The only difference here is that along with the question, you have to provide an answer. Once again, nothing too hard to program. The site, however, offers a ton of features that are not so easy to program. I’ll include the question stream (where you see your friends) and the various integrations as the hardest part of creating the site.

The design is remarkable. It uses a lot of CSS3, especially for the rounded corners, and it is rather simple. Each user can upload their own background so that takes care of that.

Business Use:

Well, this is the best part. You know how so many companies have twitter accounts and you can @ twitter them and they will answer your questions publicly? Well, this is even better because now, this idea has sort of a “filter”. No more advertisements, straight answers only!
Here is a widget, so YOU can ask ME anything.

Here is the account: formspring.me/wajanus.