Admittedly, I am a Twitter junkie, and I do most of my crowdsourcing in real time via Twitter polling. I was convinced that I should give Ask500People a look, and can safely say that if nothing else it is a huge time sink. The dynamic visual results sucked me right in and cost me at least ten minutes - that's a large time investment for my short attention span online, especially with something I'd never used before.
What's changed since our last review? Ask500People is introducing demographic polling: poll for results by gender, age, location, team, education. That is huge, and definitely something you can't do with a casual poll on Twitter. Knowing this level of details for an answer to your question is valuable information, and seeing it visually represented is even better.
The company will also be adding the ability to follow polls via a "favorite" system. This is handy if you want to track results over time. Coupled with the demographics and the new embed functionality, Ask500People should pick up a real presence in the online polling sector. Up until now, the fact that competitors like Twiigs and others have had embed capability from the start has put Ask500People at a disadvantage for getting noticed and used.
Other new features include the ability to vote on comments in a way similar to Reddit (arrows that give you an up or down option), and a way to vote on the poll questions as well. Ask500People has also improved the site navigation and given you a way to search past polls as well as integrating with Gnipcentral for volume control. You can also see the more popular question via RSS now, and follow Ask500People on Twitter (@ask500).