I’m all about trying out new social services, applications and tools. I love learning about a new product and getting around inside it to figure out its capabilities and features.

Perhaps recognizing that fact, Mike from Chat Ventures contacted me recently and offered to let me beta-test a new WordPress plugin they were developing called Qwidget.

What is Qwidget? It’s simple. Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness. On the surface, you will see a simple question, to which you can (without registration and hardly any thought) answer yes or no. Your answer is recorded.

Next, Qwidget offers you the chance to register (in the widget, it’s free and quick, you don’t even leave the site) and provide more details about why you chose your answer. Also, you will see other comments from other folks on the same question.

Notice that I did not say anything about the other folks having answered the question on this blog! In fact, Qwidget keeps a keyboard-based library of questions available for all Qwidget-enabled blogs to choose from. This means that blogs with the same sort of content (and resultingly, the same sort of questions) will be able to pool their discussions and answers via Qwidget.

Although still in beta, I think Qwidget has a ton of potential and I’m proud to be one of the early beta-testers of the service.

So, I will put my first poll question at the end of this post and I invite you to at least click yes, no, or maybe. If you are reading this article in your news reader, hop on over. My site doesn’t have ads so you don’t have to worry about making me 1/100th of a cent.

If you really like the way Qwidget works, and you run your own self-hosted WordPress blog, feel free to contact me at the information provided in my sidebar or visit the Qwidget ‘get this’ link and fill out the form expressing your interest in the beta.

Did Flickr just add a few new features?  Check out the screenshot I made.. I don’t remember this zoom feature, or the new comment include features..

Although I forgot to grab it in the screenshot, there’s also some quick links for bold and italic within the comment block as well.

Add to this integration with Picnik, and we are seeing a bunch of new features being added fairly rapidly to this platform.

Update: Never mind, my excitement overcame my rational brain for a few minutes.  I had forgotten I had installed the Firefox addon Better Flickr from Lifehacker earlier today.

Please, resume your normal lives.  Thanks.

Many of my regular readers will be familiar with Toluu because I have linked to it quite a bit, especially in my RSS Reset articles.  Toluu is a useful, unique utility that allows you to build a portfolio of RSS feeds that you subscribe to, and then using a matching algorithm, receive recommendations for feeds that you might like and other Toluu users that have similar tastes as you.

My use of Toluu has grown these past few weeks to the point where it has become a permanent addition to the list of useful sites I hit almost every day.  So imagine how pleased I was to hear that Toluu was going to add some great new features today!

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