Google has decided to bolster Google+ with the help of Polar

Sep 12, 2014 11:44 GMT  ·  By

Google has purchased Polar, a company that is specialized in online polls, indicating some efforts at the company to pump up the offers of its not-so-popular social network.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Luke Wroblewski and the talented Polar team to Google! They’ll be joining our team and helping us make G+ even more awesome,” Googler Dave Besbris wrote on his blog.

Google+ has been around for a few years, but it came late to the party, meaning that it will likely never reach the fame and success of Facebook. With more than 1.3 billion users, Facebook seems unbeatable and Google certainly knows this.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to give up on its project just because it cannot be the best at it. The company has tweaked, twisted and sought to improve Google+ as much as possible, trying to offer those that do prefer this different type of social network a nice place to go to. About 300 million people actively view the main news page or feed on Google+ which is a still a pretty high number, beating even Twitter in scale.

Polar, a company that was founded last year, polls users on mobile devices by letting them pick one of two options, such as what’s the best beverage – Coca Cola or Pepsi, which is the best messaging app and so on.

Half a billion polls in 2014

Half a billion polls were run in the past eight months alone, with some 1.1 million active voters using the service.

“We started with the simple idea that everyone has an opinion worth hearing. But the tools that existed online to meet this need weren’t up to the task: think Web forms, radio buttons, and worse. Ugh. We felt we could do much better by making opinions easy and fun for everyone,” writes Luke Wroblewski, founder of Polar.

He boasts that since the company launched, one in every 449 Internet users told them their opinion by voting in a poll. He thanks everyone who has done so, downloaded an app, or embedded them in their sites.

An archive of polls and data created by people can be downloaded from here on out, although the site won’t be available for ever. For a while, at least, to help with the transition, Polar’s site will continue to be available.

The service will be shuttered by the end of the year, but the team will somehow make polling a part of Google+.