As part of my time experimenting with what kinds of business research and market research can be effectively conducted on Facebook, I’ve experimented a bit with the Facebook Polls application.

It’s OK in that you get fast results–and is obviously useful if you want to do a survey about social networking users or Facebook users in particular.., but you’re limited to a single question with 5 close ended responses, and there are very limited demographic slices available. While it’s not expensive by any means, it’s not free either (how quickly our expectations have been raised!). I did a Facebook poll asking 13-17 year olds how often they use the library to gather information or do research, and the results were predictably depressing (if you love libraries that is), as the top image below illustrates

All in all, I didn’t find it any better than the free Web based survey instrument I’ve used several times with some very good luck, Zoomerang.

However, Facebook allows all sorts of third party applications on its site too, and one simply called “Polls” by Pollection was at least as good as Facebook’s, if not better, and it was free.

I did a survey using “Polls” of my Facebook “friends” along with some other Facebook users on the question of whether Facebook could ever replace Google as the leading Web search engine (following up on Robert Scoble’s controversial posting:

“Why Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years”

(And it turns out that few if any Facebook readers, at least, agree with Scoble’s prediction, at least according to the 107 voters who took my poll. The blue line with the most votes represents the answer “never”; the tan line represents the answer “possibly only for finding information about people”; the red line represents the answer “within two years” and the green “within five years”)