SubmitYourVote: Pretty UI for a Crowded Space

I seem to be developing a specialty here writing about online polling sites. The latest entrant into the space is SubmitYourVote, a new social polling site with a very pretty interface.

SubmitYourVote has all the hallmarks of a Web 2.0 site: logo with beta status, minimalist site design, and, of course, the social aspect of creating your own polls, voting on other polls, commenting and tagging of polls, and a nifty Ajax feature that takes your polling results and places them in an attractive circular graph form, complete with a color-coded graph legend and percentages. In short, it's gorgeous, and I could see a lot of uses for that type of attractive results presentation.

The problem with SubmitYourVote, however, is one that's presenting itself in a great many areas of Web 2.0 apps these days: over-saturation of product. Here at Profy alone, we've covered Twiigs, BetsGoWild, SoWeSay, Megabuzz, and Sodahead. Those articles don't take into consideration the other social polling sites we haven't covered.

If there's one thing that seems to be established in Web 2.0 already, it's that first out of the gate seems to have an edge. From there, it's a tougher hill to climb, but other sites have passed those early leaders with unique features or additional functionality. SubmitYourVote is launching this week with an attractive interface, but not much new in the way of function; at the present time, you can't even embed those pretty poll results (or even the polls themselves) in your site. In addition, with apparently no site moderation, some of the polls seem to have devolved into a free-for-all, with one poll featured on the home page at the time I'm writing this with a poll title featuring vulgarity, something that might be okay with the MySpace crowd, but would make you think again about using it for any practical or business application. I'm far from prudish, but in a field where the competitors already have a head-start, it's the little things that can hinder success.