Ever wished you could harness the proverbial ‘wisdom of the crowds’ in some matter of personal or professional decision making? Well, I have, on various occasions, but never came across a simple way of doing that. That’s set to change, for an Indian startup has created a web application called Tezaa, that seeks to generate a ‘community-driven knowledge base of opinions’. In web lingo, if Google is a ‘search engine’ and Wikipedia is a ‘knowledge engine’, Tezaa is like an ‘opinion engine’, helping people in making common day-to-day decisions.

Tezaa is the creation of 23 year old Shalin Jain, who founded TenMiles Corp, a Chennai based software company. Inspired by James Surowiecki’s book, ‘The Wisdom of the Crowds’, Shalin conceptualized Tezaa, as a means of tapping into the collective wisdom of the Web2.0 crowds. The idea is to facilitate decision making, and occasionally even substitute conventional web search. It’s like ‘being in the crowd and knowing their minds too’. Tezaa lets anyone post questions as polls and get opinions from other users. Polls can be posted on any topic including technology, politics, travel, sports, education and social issues. And you can do this really fast, something that is reflected in the name for the application (the name Tezaa is derived from the Urdu word tez, which means ‘fast’)

Tezaa is a pretty much in the Web2.0 mould. The site’s content is generated & moderated entirely by users. And its AJAXified user interface is simple and clean; signing up and creating your polls is super easy (it took me less than five minutes). The main UI (based on Google’s search page) is very well designed, with the poll playing in the bottom left part of the screen. I think that the usage of screen space is very innovative.

You can paste a poll into your website or blog ; you can also tag it for Technorati’s/Google’s spiders to pick up its scents. In fact, that’s what makes Tezaa so exciting. Not convinced ? Ok…here’s why.

Google for the ‘best hangout in Chennai’. You will get 17000 hits, but the number one result is a Tezaa poll on the same topic, where people have actually voted for their favorite Chennai joint. If the sample size is not too flimsy (say, more than 60), you probably are looking at good advice. You could also have come to the same conclusion by reading a few blogs or travel websites, but that is time consuming. So a combination of a ‘search engine’ and an ‘opinion engine’ could actually come in pretty handy. The search engine does the basic filtering from the entire universe of available information. The opinion engine narrows down the search to a smaller community of interest.

Like other user-driven Web2.0 services, Tezaa’s growth will depend on people who believe in helping others and sharing information about areas they know of. But that’s not all, for there is another social hook that Tezaa has– it offers an element of momentary entertainment. Early feedback indicates that some people are finding it addictive; some say it’s fun to know what others think of your questions.

So what are the other web applications that let you do something similar as Tezaa. You have Yahoo Answers, that’s more like an answer forum rather than a ‘quick fix’ public poll. There are other polling/quiz applications but none of the ones that I know of, are geared into the social aspect of the web the way Tezaa is. And that’s a huge plus, if the success of Digg, Delicious, Wikipedia et al is anything to go by.

Shalin has informed me that many new features are planned to be integrated into Tezaa. While it’s good to know that, I hope it doesn’t complicate the application. For the beauty of Tezaa lies in its simplicity…it doesn’t promise you the moon; but what it promises, it delivers really well.