Lately, with Twitter revenue streams discussed and Facebook statuses leading to targeted ads, there’s been a lot of Internet chatter over whether you can monetize opinions and thoughts. It has been a fun debate to watch unfold, but now, thanks to Scoople, there’s a whole new side to the debate. Scoople aims to turn sharing opinions on the news into a game. It turns out that while arguing about sensitive topics can be frustrating, guessing whether people will agree with you is a lot more fun.
That is essentially what Scoople asks its users to do. The app is simply a series of third party news stories that are turned into questions that users answer. Once they’ve answered the question they can decide whether they think people will agree with their answer or disagree. If the user chooses correctly, they earn points that can be used to purchase little additions to their thumbnail profile ID. It is, admittedly, a low-risk, low-reward game that Scoople offers its players, but it’s also kind of fun.
The trick is figuring out if you really know which way public sentiment will go on an issue while putting aside your own feelings. Most questions have a time limit of at least a few hours, so waiting to see whether you were right can be a bit boring, but that time only offers more opportunity to answer additional questions.
My main issue with using Scoople came when figuring out why some stories contained questions while others did not. It appears that most of the newer stories that post don’t include a question for users to guess at, whereas the stories listed as “Top Stories” more often than not offer a poll question for the reader. From what I can tell, there isn’t really a justification for it in the app, and it would be nice if all stories linked had a subsequent question to answer. After all, you can’t invite someone to play a game and then leave the equipment at home.
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