If you're like me, you receive a large number of forwarded emails from friends;
many of them are funny, many are factually incorrect and many are just pointless.
Then again, if you are like me, you have worn an eye patch for the eighth consecutive
year at Halloween, but that's beside the point.
Another popular email forward are those in which people list a bunch of questions
about themselves. They might mention their favorite food, their middle name,
their favorite smell, anything that could help you understand who they are,
and at the same time, things that make you wonder how you ended up being friends
with them in the first place. The problem, though, is these lists are redundant,
and while it's nice for your friends to want you to know EVEN MORE about them,
there's not much of a challenge to it.
If you're like me, you read through
the list (of course, after removing the eye patch, because it's hard to read
with just one eye) and probably forget everything once you close the email.
On top of that, since there are 435,129 questions that need to be answered,
you may not even read the whole thing. Then again, friends of pirates should
know that pirates are busy creatures by nature and do not have too much extra
time to read forwards.
So the people at QuizYourFriends.com have introduced a way to take
the place of a forward, while turning the process of learning about your friends
into a full-fledged competition. At the site, you can enter up to 10 questions
about yourself and include a correct answer, with three incorrect answers,
to challenge your friends. In this respect, the people who take the quiz actually
have to think about you, instead of glancing over whether you prefer bacon
bits or croutons.
I created a quiz and sent it to my friends. Some of them performed well, others
were a little suspect. I would let you take a stab at
my quiz, but it has since expired. You'd probably be better off just making your
own quiz and sending it to your friends.
QuizYourFriends.com isn't a perfect system by any means. In fact, if you look
at my leaderboard, you'll notice my mom scored a 100, when actually, she has
been disqualified from competition due to cheating. I asked her why she, a
college mathematics professor, would even attempt to cheat on a meaningless
quiz, and she said, "I just wanted to see if I could." I wonder if
her students try to use the same logic!
Also, looking at the leaderboard, another contestant scored a 9, which would
be impossible for my quiz. There are 10 questions, and each is worth 10 points.
The contestant wasn't sure how that occurred, but he also noticed minor functionality
problems with the quiz as well.
It would also be nice to have the option to assign point values for particular
answers on the quiz. Instead of just having one correct answer, you could award
so many points for each possible answer. A perfect use for this is my Crazy
Survey. For those of you who haven't taken it yet, please click
here to take
the survey. So far, everyone has been crazy.
I sent questions to QuizYourFriends.com in hopes of getting background information
on the site, but it's been a week and they haven't replied yet. I guess they
use their site to store questions and answers, but they don't like to answer
questions about the site. I hope I didn't accidentally just delete their answer
because I couldn't see it through my eye patch.
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