TNW Pick of the Day: Indecisive? Ovoto lets you create impromptu ‘yes or no’ polls around photos

If you ever have problems making decisions on what shoes to buy, which gig to go to or where to book your next holiday, this app will likely be right up your street.

Ovoto is the product of Ireland-based social search startup HeyStaks, and it’s available to download for free on iOS and Android. So what does it do? In short, it lets you take a photograph and create an impromptu poll to help you reach a decision.

The app connects with Facebook and Twitter and lets you ask your friends and followers whether you should do something based around the following seven verbs: buy, sell, go, do, eat, drink and wear.

So…how does it work?

The app has three main tabs – the first one is your current polls, the second one is the main photo-taking tab from which you also create a new poll, and the last one is polls created by your friends:

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For each poll you have active, you’ll see the time left on it and the response rates thus far. You can set the poll to last from 15 minutes through to 7 days.

Sure, there are other options for getting people’s opinions in the social sphere – I often find myself tweeting out questions such as ‘should I buy the Kindle instead of a Kindle Touch’ to get a general consensus. But there’s a lot to be said for really simple apps such as this that focus on one key feature, doing it very well.

“Rather than just sharing photos, we wanted to enable people to communicate through the medium of a photo,” says co-creator Maurice Coyle. “We built it in five days from concept to a submittable native app and with a scalable cloud infrastructure on the back-end. On-the-go decision-making suits this because it’s not only useful in many scenarios but as you’ll hopefully see, there’s loads of fun applications of it.”

If you’ve ever read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, about a man who lives his life by the roll of a dice, this app may resonate with you somewhat. Of course you’ll not want to hand over all your decision-making to your friends in cyberspace, but if you’re just looking for a simple way to sway a choice to ‘yes’ or ‘no’, then Ovoto could be well worth your time.

Meanwhile, you can read all our Pick of the Day selections here.

➤ Ovoto: iOS | Android