Peanut Labs Debuts Piecemeal Profiling Tool

Social media sample specialist Peanut Labs has teamed up with CivicScience, a provider of data mining and other technology, to launch Wisdom of the Web, a new tool which gradually builds a picture of respondents from answers to a number of separate short polls.

The tool takes individuals' answers to short online polls, typically consisting of one to three questions, and links them to answers to other such polls given by the same respondent using a unique, anonymous digital identifier, gradually building up a picture of the individual's attitudes, beliefs, preferences and demographics. The polls appear on a variety of third-party web properties, including news sites, blogs, social networks, membership organizations, and mobile-based locations.

In time, the profiles thus constructed enable the software to serve more relevant questions to the individuals, accelerating the build up of useful information, the firms say.

To date in 2010, Pittsburgh, PA-based CivicScience says it has cataloged over 40,000,000 poll responses with many respondents providing 'dozens and even hundreds' of answers over time: it expects to speed up this process and collect something approaching two billion responses in 2011. Respondents are split c.50/50 between those based in North America and elsewhere.

Sean Case, SVP of Peanut Labs, comments: 'Wisdom of the Web leverages CivicScience's unique and innovative methodology to help us provide our clients with a model to engage large numbers of respondents who may not otherwise have the time or inclination to participate in attitudinal research.'

Peanut Labs is based in San Francisco with offices in Seattle and New York City and was founded in July 2007. Last week, Research Now parent e-Rewards announced an agreement to acquire Peanut Labs in a deal expected to complete next month.

Web sites are at www.peanutlabs.com and www.civicscienceinc.com .