CircleUp.com - Manage Group Communications thru Outlook

CircleUp is a new web service that offers a plug-in that you can download onto your Outlook account or alternatively install a widget into your Google or Netvibes start up pages. CircleUp allows you to send out a single question to a group of email contacts or in real-time through instant messenger, and receive a single, collective response instead of weeding through tons of emails and IMs (AOL or Yahoo!) You can organize the polls you send out by purpose (work, family, church group, soccer team, etc) The groups you have in your email contacts do not have to sign up or download anything, and the service is 100 percent free. You will be able to choose the style of request you would like to make, ranging from provide suggestions, to a thumbs up, thumbs down question, true or false, update your contact info, or rows and columns.

“CircleUp helps you ask questions and make requests of communities of any size using eMail and Instant Messaging and get back a single, consolidated result instead of a blizzard of emails and Instant Messages.”

Could they make the site more convenient by allowing you to send the questions out directly from your Outlook account? Will they create question types in which you can use without the Microsoft emailing system, and adapt it to gmail, yahoo mail and other services, as well as some social networking services as well? Will they also make CircleUp more social networking friendly, by adding user profiles and allow commenting, messaging, etc.?