“How do you poll multiple people via email?” Send the question out to 10 colleagues, invariably get 30 replies back and you dig through the banter to try and get a consensus of opinion.
CircleUp proposes a solution anytime you need to compile opinion, get feedback or even get the answer to a simple “chicken or fish” poll from multiple brains. The service facilitates delivery of your question to your targets, driving recipients to the web to enter their answer without bothering you with all the noise and discussion in email. You can then review the responses on one page and (hopefully) get a clear answer.
There are other social planning/Q&A tools. Many work for a few test cases, but then are abandoned as users fall into their old “email everything” habits or they are resistant to joining a service to participate. CircleUp has built a web application that deals with the problem of polling select groups of individuals in a simple and usable fashion.
The first thing that struck me about CircleUp is how quickly it got itself out of the way and addressed the issue of user adoption. You initially demo the service from the point of view of your recipients, so you can immediately answer the first question: Will the people I work with use this?
Email clutter while you ask your question is your problem, not theirs. How many times do you sign up for a service that promises to replace email, invite your colleagues so they can participate and they never log in making the whole thing useless? CircleUp recognizes that the non-CircleUp member experience is just as important, if not more important than the member experience. Well done.

What do your colleagues get when you send them a CircleUp? A plain text email from you, not CircleUp, with your question and a request to follow a link to a simple CircleUp page to indicate their answer. Easy. As far as your colleague is concerned, they’re done and they can go back to work. It takes less time and hassle to respond to a CircleUp than it does to hit “reply,” and that is where this application is going to find its success.
From your end, preparing your question to send through CircleUp is intuitive. A wizard walks you step-by-step through creating the question and then formatting how you want the answers collected. You can attach files, so CircleUp may be a good way to get approval on a budget or document. You can decide whether you want to limit answers to set choices, or invite recipients to give free-form opinion. It all depends on how you plan to analyze the data later. You decide whether you want the results public to the world, just the people who answered, or just for yourself.

You choose your recipients based on circles, natch. You have up to 9 circles you can create containing any number of contacts. When you create your CircleUp, you pick the circle you want it to go to, with the option of editing out any recipients you don’t want to include for that particular question. You are not limited to email. You can use a contact’s IM account (currently only Yahoo and AIM) to send them the CircleUp link. You have the option of sharing your circles, so everyone in that group can also use the service to ask questions.
Today CircleUp introduces an Outlook toolbar, to make it easier for folks who use the email client to work with CircleUp data without leaving Outlook. Once again, the priority appears to be on working the web application into the habits and workflow the users may already have outside the web browser.

They also offer a site widget, so you can ask questions of website visitors instead of a circle, as well as Google and Netvibes plug-ins for managing your questions off the CircleUp site. A page on their site suggests a multitude of ways that CircleUp can work with existing embedding technologies. In short, if there’s a widget, gadget or doo-dad, CircleUp wants you to be able to ask your questions through it.
For what it is, CircleUp is slick. I’d like to see the site offer forums or website-based support outside of the wizards. As it stands, you can’t figure out how to do something until you actually start doing it. The service is currently 100% free, with unspecified future plans for a premium service.
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