Sunday, April 4 2010
There are many great symbols out there you could use in online micro-conversations, but they tend to be quite cumbersome to find. We decided to change this! What started as small internal tool, we now want to share with you as well. Let us present: The Emoticon Zoo! Some Examples how it could be used. For a flight from London Heathrow to Sydney you could write LHR ✈ SYD or for expressing your love to chocolate Chocolate ♥♥♥ :> or for telling the nifty trick to invert your screen colors in OS X press ctrl+⌥+⌘+8 or even to communicate your problems to stay awake (-.-)Zzz If you want to improve the zoo by adding new symbols, have problems or general feedback, then drop us some lines at @triviah_com or hello@triviah.com.

There are many great symbols out there you could use in online micro-conversations, but they tend to be quite cumbersome to find. We decided to change this! What started as small internal tool, we now want to share with you as well. Let us present: The Emoticon Zoo!

Some Examples how it could be used.

For a flight from London Heathrow to Sydney you could write

LHR ✈ SYD

or for expressing your love to chocolate

Chocolate ♥♥♥ :>

or for telling the nifty trick to invert your screen colors in OS X

press ctrl+⌥+⌘+8

or even to communicate your problems to stay awake

(-.-)Zzz

If you want to improve the zoo by adding new symbols, have problems or general feedback, then drop us some lines at @triviah_com or hello@triviah.com.

Tuesday, March 30 2010

The Impossible Quiz

A couple of days ago we hosted the Impossible Quiz—it entailed a mix of social and knowledge questions. We thought the most interesting part was where you had to give the answer you thought the least people would give. For instance:

Select peace or war.

You only got a point if you choose the most unpopular answer, i.e., what you thought the least number of people would pick in this competition. Now, if you asked some people on the street, they would probably choose “peace”. But knowing that you had to pick the most unpopular answer, you should probably pick “war”. But then again, the other contestants might have thought exactly the same, so you might be better off picking “peace” again. Or do you even have to think one level further and pick “war”?? -_^

As you see, this gets pretty confusing. So what did people pick in the end? These were the final results:

64% peace, 36% war.

Is this surprising? We think it is! The outcome was not random at all: a large amount of people completely misjudged the other contestants. That’s what makes this experiment interesting. :]

As for the other parts of the quiz, there might have been some luck involved, depending on whether you liked Avatar or you thought Jennifer was a particular nice name. To review all questions and answers, see here.

In total, there were slightly over 50 people who participated. The final winner was nadie_hp with 24 out of 32 points. Second was Muffy with 23 points, closely followed by Tianna and JosephPLi with 22 points. Shared 5th position went to Alba Palomera and srpsco with 21 points.

We hope you all had fun, and eagerly await the next quiz! Follow us on twitter at @triviah_com to stay up-to-date, and answer questions from previous visitors on triviah.com.