The Everybody Votes Channel... it requires a system update and then a Wii Shop Channel download.  Curiosity has me updating currently and then I'm going to download and see what's up with it.

I'm eager to hear what you have to say about it! Perhaps it's a channel where you can vote for what games you want to see made available for the VC etc... that would be cool!

cheers,

-avatar!

That's what I was hoping, but it so far asked questions like "what century would you like to live", "what is the most romantic gift", "which pet do you prefer", and ... something else.  Each one only has two choices.  It allows you to vote for your choice and then predict which will be the most popular; then it promises to maintain various statistics on how accurate your predictions and how in tune your choices are.  Seems neat and is yet another use of your Mii(s---up to 6).

... But also totally pointless.

Hopefully they will ask more hardhitting questions later, such as the one avatar! was talking about.

I know, BAMAToNE.  Maybe after it gets going or something?  We'll see.

Sounds like Marketing tactics... Gaining information about the Wii userbase for their opinions about various lifestyles/services/preferences so they can turn around and sell off the group demographics data to various Marketing companies.

It's more likely Nintendo will use this information themselves.  No need to sell the data to anyone else.  Unless the questions become more hard-hitting like Avatar! says, the current questions are not that useful, especially since there are only two choices.  Nintendo's own customer feedback surveys (they occasionally send them to people who opted-in and have registered games through Nintendo.com) are somewhat more useful for them.

I think the best part about this was the surprise.  I turned my Wii on because I wanted to look something up on GameFAQs (my Wii starts up much faster than my 1999 PC) and when I was done I noticed I had three messages instead of the usual one.

The channel itself is pretty cool, I'd say.  Even though the first batch of questions are kinda brain dead, the potential here is really cool, especially if a future update expands the number of available choices beyond two per question.  I would strongly welcome more marketing research type questions, especially if it leads to improvements in the system and/or VC games made available for it.

It would also be pretty damn cool if Nintendo starts holding contests around prediction accuracy over time.  I don't know how'd they'd prevent collusion, but GameFAQs does the same thing with its redundant best character tournaments, so here's hoping.  Some free Wii points would make a nice prize.