You want an answer? Tezaa, here it is!

Sufia Tippu
Tuesday, 20 June 2006 18:45

IT Industry - Market

Would you like to know how many people think that Microsoft can come up with an iPod killer? Maybe you want an opinion about what Apple’s best product is on the market right now? Or perhaps, you just want to find a cool pub to hang out in Bangalore?
You can always do a Google search to find the answers but chances are that you may not always get quick, accurate information.

Enter Tezza. Created by 23-year-old Indian, Shalin Jain, Tezaa.com (tezaa means fast in Hindi) promises quick answers – through the poll route.

Tezza is a unique Web 2.0 community driven portal which uses polls, primarily, to attract information. You can start a poll on just about anything... technology, eating out, movies, politics... 

Just live for two weeks, Tezza has gathered numerous members and even more opinions spanning technology, music, blogs and so on. And, according to some, it sure beats conventional web search which demands that you read a lot reviews and comparisons before you finally find the answer.  

“I was actually writing an enterprise level survey system and it struck me that if I wrote an open system - it could benefit a lot more people,” says Shalin. “It’s like being in the crowd and knowing their minds too. Everyone likes to get first-hand reports and opinions from others.”

Inspired by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of the Crowds, the Tezaa Project aims at generating social wisdom that will give back to the society

Unlike other poll sites like www.dpolls.com and www.zohopolls.com, Tezaa allows you to add a choice. “This is like social participation at all levels. Say you go to the page which throws up the best schools in Chennai, if you think there is a better school you can actually add it,” Shalin explains.

Basically, Tezaa is built on the concept that content is created by users and moderated by users – along the same lines as Digg.com or Wikipedia.org.

Digg.com is for tech news, where anyone can come and post a story. If others like the story, they press the DIGG IT button and vote for it and if more and more people like a story the story eventually gets to the homepage.  Wikipedia.org is based on a similar concept where anyone can participate, write and edit content, and the site has become a runaway success.

Another site which works along the same lines is del.icio.us  -  a social book marking system –where if you like a story, you bookmark it on del.icio.us. The greater the number of people book marking a link, the more popular,  more valuable and more trust worthy the link is considered.

So if Digg is for news, Wikipedia is for facts  and del.icio.us, is for links,  Tezaa wants to get the top share in opinions.

Says Alok Shinde, director, ICT practice, Frost & Sullivan, “If you see the entire evolution of the web, you realize that the first wave was the content drive, then it was enterprise and commerce; and now it s a P2P – a people-to-people kind of interaction. There is a sense of greater pragmatism on the Web as well as a need for self expression. And, with more people going online, these types of portals are giving a greater depth to this new dimension of people interaction.”

Competition to Tezaa comes from Yahoo Answers – a huge question and answer community - and www.listible.com, which maintains lists and enables people to vote for things

But polls provide fun and entertainment.

Tezaa adds to the growing list of user-driven Web 2.0 services which offer less page loads and where applications are a lot quicker using AJAX libraries.