Fair enough... but if this is just a completely random, not-even-remotely-scientific man on the street approach, then what problem does this solve that a poll i can add to my website/blog/favorite forum via Fantastico in 180 seconds doesn't?
It puts it in front of people that don't already know about your product.
I can ask usability questions of my users, but their existing knowledge will effect what is "easy" and "intuitive" (intuitive generally means, "what I'm used to"). I can ask marketing questions of them, but I've already pulled them into my site, so my current message will be the one that gets reinforced. I can ask "compare these two products" questions, but I already know a preponderance of people on my site prefer my product to our competitors (one of which is Fantastico, by the way). I can ask any number of things, and we do frequently ask our customers opinions on things, but by virtue of them being on our site the results are known to be skewed in exactly the way we don't want them to be for a large number of questions.
Also, I don't want to clutter up my site with constant polls. When someone is on our site, we have very clear goals we want to achieve: Teach them about the benefits, help them choose the right products, show them how to use it, answer their questions. Asking them random questions isn't my idea of good design, when it comes to those goals.
Example: I am designing a logo for a market research site. I put up the pickfu logo against mine (or just use two of mine), & ask users which company does market research.
Examples 2-100: A poll on my site or blog would work fine but... I don't want people on my site to know what I'm polling. I don't have a site. I don't know how to do polls on my site. My IT department says it will take 8 weeks. My web design guys say they don't have the module for this particular CMS - they can build one from scratch for $2k. I told the web design guys to go to hell & found an embeddable polling service, it'll take 4 weeks & they won't be responsible if it doesn't work. I worked it out with the web design guys but my boss says we need to use the companies standard colour scheme - the widget won't change its colour.
