If you’re a news junkie who wants to make the experience a little more active, Scoople may be the iPhone app for you.
The app was created by a startup called Dygest. When you’re using it, you get a stream of news stories, and each story has an associated poll. For example, you can read a story about the iPad’s new Retina display, and then fill out a poll about whether you’ve preordered the iPad already, earning points in the process. You can also vote on what you think the majority of Scoople users will say. There’s even a leaderboard of those who do the best job of predicting the the larger response.
Eventually, the polls are closed and the final tally is posted in the “results” section. The most interesting polls are also turned into infographics posted on the Scoople blog.
Behind the scenes, Scoople’s technology is following various news sites and automatically aggregating multiple stories into a single Scoople article (with links to the original sources, of course). Then a member of the Scoople team (which includes some journalism grad students) turns that news into a poll.
Scoople actually launched late last year, but has been relatively under the radar. As for a business model, CEO and co-founder Alain Mayer says it’s still to be decided, but will probably have something to do with the enormous amount of poll data that the site is collecting.
You can download the Scoople app here.