Ask me Anything at Formspring.me
Social media opportunities are growing quickly as people look for new ways to connect and engage. Noobie.com visitors have already learned about Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, and now there is a new player in the social media space: FormSpring.me. This new site helps people interact by asking and answering questions about absolutely anything.
If FormSpring sounds familiar, you may remember it from a Noobie article covering their core product. FormSpring’s core product provides smart and easy ways to collect and manage data using easy-to-build forms. The company observed that many of its users were creating simple, Q&A-type forms, and they saw an opportunity to leverage that into something more fun and social.
How to Get Started
When you arrive at the FormSpring.me site, you won’t find a lot of self promotion or instructions, but getting started is simple. You can either login using your Facebook account or you can sign up for a FormSpring.me account by providing an e-mail address, creating a username (which also will be part of your personal formspring.me URL), and setting a password.
How it Works
It really is as simple as it sounds. Setting up an account creates your profile page where you can post your picture and a short bio. Anyone who visits your profile page can ask you any question they want. Questions can be anonymous or you can set a requirement that users are logged in before they can ask questions. Adding this option should help prevent spam or inappropriate question asking, but it also limits your ability to connect with new people.
Questions you get asked will be queued in your FormSpring.me inbox. You can respond however you want—it’s your profile page. Answer honestly or use humor to publicly diffuse tough questions.
Are you feeling a little out of your comfort zone yet? Don’t worry. Questions you get asked won’t appear on your profile page until after you answer them. If there is a question you don’t want to answer, you can easily delete it. And, if the asked question feels like spam or is otherwise inappropriate, you can “report” it, which will block the person who asked it from ever asking you another question.
How You Connect
FormSpring.me can enhance your presence on other social media platforms. By providing the relevant account details, you can ask to have your answered questions published to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Blogger. Or, add a FormSpring.me widget to your blog or website and people can ask questions without ever leaving your site.
You also can follow people directly through FormSpring.me. For the people you follow, all their answered questions will appear chronologically on a feed-like page that you can access when you are logged into your FormSpring.me account.
Why Connect?
So how is asking a question on FormSpring.me different from asking a question on another social media platform? The key difference, and possible risk, will probably be the opportunity for anonymity. Everyone has questions they’d love to ask of people, but they might be considered inappropriate in the “real” world. It will be interesting to see what happens to when users truly open themselves up to any question from any person-and provides answers.
On the downside, FormSpring.me doesn’t send e-mails, texts or other alerts when you have a question to answer or when someone else has answered a question you asked. So, keeping a dialogue going on your FormSpring.me profile page will require frequent visits to the site.
Like most real-life interviews, people’s FormSpring.me profiles usually start out with easy-to-answer questions that aren’t too personal. So, if you’re looking for something juicy, your first few visits may prove disappointing. Over time, however, questions and answers tend to become more revealing. Check it out to see just how revealing they will get.