Newsletter

Google releases one of my most hoped-for tools.

Update: Turns out, an easy to remember URL for making a new form without starting a spreadsheet first is http://spreadsheets.google.com/newform.

Ever since I've been working with Cru on their website, or with UMN Housing as an RA, I've had a pretty big need to collect survey and response data from large groups of people. This has varied from needing to make registration forms for retreats to finding out what a small group's favorite t-shirt design is.

There's been a number of tools that fill the niche. Survey Monkey and Wufoo are worthy entries in the product space, but all tools of the sort have limits, and they charge when you surpass them. Their investors like money. As a result, I've been required to make my own special-case form tools for each retreat Cru has had, because we have ~600 members, and there isn't a tool that collects responses from that many people for free.

Until today. Google, whose investors have noticed that it doesn't really matter whether or not most of Google's side projects make money, has released a competitor that pretty much smears the competition off the internet.
Here's the Google Docs blog entry.
Basically, you make an empty spreadsheet, and share it to people via a constructed form, which you're given the option of building up at share time. Since it's simply a specially-shared Google Docs Spreadsheet, you get standard spreadsheet functionality on your collected data for free, immediately. It's pretty much the sweetest thing ever.

Now all they need to do is integrate it with Google Pages.