Listiki offers a smart way of gathering public opinion through crowdsourced lists

Listiki (a portmanteau of the words “list” and “wiki”) lets you crowdsource lists of, well, anything. This could be something as trivial as a list of the ‘top ten horror movies’ or something more self-serving like, I don’t know, ‘5 must-read tech bloggers’. Lists can be as short or as long as you like and each item may also include a URL.

But here’s the clever bit: any list can, effectively, be cloned so that you can re-order items to your own taste (via drag ‘n’ drop) or even add, delete and/or replace them. Any changes made are interpreted in real time and ripple through to a ‘master’ list, aggregating the opinions of all contributors but without destroying your own version of the list. You can also, of course, view the original lists of other contributors to that subject. It’s pretty neat.

Overall, Listiki is pitching itself as a list-building platform which allows you to gather and share opinions. Whereas polls are “linear, single-selection tools” and forums, Twitter, Facebook, and blog comments are more conversational but less structured, “organizing things into lists comes extremely naturally to people”, say its makers.

And while list creation tools, fairly simple in nature, is already quite a crowded space, Listiki says its solution differs from competitors like Listology, which allows users to create individual lists that aren’t editable by others, or editor created list sites such as Listverse. However, Listphile, a user-generated list site that supports multiple authors, and Path.io (co-founded by Sean Fanning of Napster fame), which is still in private beta, would appear to be more direct competitors.

With that in mind, on Listiki’s road map are plans to add better support for media, user profiles, private/invite-only lists, embedding of lists, geolocation and better discovery, and an API so that third-parties can build on top of the site’s data.

Listiki, co-founded by Alex Schleifer, Constantinos Demetriadis and Davina Economou, is based in Cyprus. The startup is seed funded by Athens, Greece-based OpenFund.