In a world of increasingly generated content, having genuine human input given in a natural way is essential. I've spent the last 3 months building Surfey from scratch with my friend Barto and I believe we are onto something great and necessary. But I do worry I've created a cart before having a horse and that this is a tool in search of a niche.

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[ Surfey "Orange Marmalade" early demo ]

The task before me now is to find where the biggest pain is at with traditional text and arduous survey methods; where spontaneity and privacy are in high demand. For example, everyone tells me that politics is too hot but isn't it important to give voice to every opinion? If I could poll crowds of people for honest responses without revealing their identity, I think that's valuable. Otherwise we're to believe that text surveys, checkboxes, and multiple choice answers are sufficient to represent our vast choir of thoughts and feelings and perceptions.

And what about the annoying things in our contemporary connected lives: would you recommend us to a friend, pick 1 to 10? Does your audience's taste really boil down to a number? And when you dump them into a full blown multi-page questionnaire from that click, do you think they're going to give you engaged and intuitive answers? I think people often have little to say or a lot: "It's fine, it was a hamburger" versus "ZOMG! I loved/hated it and let me tell you exactly why." Why leave all of that on the floor if they're willing to give it and why annoy them if they're not? Let people express themselves as they want to, not as you've structured them.

Finally, the surprise aspect of selfie surveys could be a big boon for anyone looking to find first impressions as written on someone's face and arising from their voice. Imagine: you create a funny T-shirt and flash it in the video: what is the reaction? You don't need to ASK them because you can SEE it. That's worth a thousand words and requires no typing on the participant's part.

What uses for selfie video surveys do you see? Let me know!

• Customer Wishlist: what do you want us to make?
• Police Lineup: which one do you recognize?
• Employee Morale: what's really going on inside their heads and hearts?
• Jury Pre-Selection: canned set of questions to quickly pick candidates and stop wasting tax payer time
• A/B product comparison: do you prefer this or that
• Real Estate: QR code on For Sale sign or in Open House where prospective buyers can see more info and leave their interest level without bothering with the agent.
• Restaurant / Receipt: how was the food today? You can show me what you got in your survey with your camera
• Daily Battle Plan: record yourself presenting prompts to yourself for a daily or weekly checkin (by yourself for yourself)
• Advertising Verbatims: watch a person watching your potential ad