Believe it or not, I have something positive to say about an otherwise dreadful survey site, ECN. It was through them that I got an invitation to Opinion Central in March. It was only available for a short time, but it did give me the opportunity to check it out for a review.  As you’ll see, I was going to ask Yourfreesurveys to look into offering the link, but I changed my mind.

Opinion Central looks good enough at first glance. Graphics are great and it’s very professionally done. They do send out surveys infrequently, at least to me, as I’ve been a member since March and have only accumulated about 1800 points. What will that get me, you ask? Not much. The bigger issue here is that even if they sent out a survey a day and you had a pile of points to spend, there’s not a heck of a lot to choose from. Here’s what they offer:

slim super lightweight pocket calculator with translucent body and raised black rubber buttons (3825)

Men’s watch with matte/polished silver case, blue sunray dial, raised silver hour markings, silver hands, black leatherette strap and second hand (8450)

iPod Shuffle Silver 1GB (25,000)

iPod Nano Silver 4GB (60,000)

I can assure you, it will take several years by my calculations to get your hands on that iPod Nano. I’m not patient enough for that. And their website will tell you that no survey will take you longer than 15 minutes. Ha…now that’s a good one. Try no less than 30 and mostly more than that. Please let me know if I’m way off base here, but the surveys I got were looonnnnggg. There is a long list of  sweepstakes winners for April. And from the Opinion Central website:

“We currently do not offer incentives on every survey. Occasionally, an opportunity will arise where compensation for survey completion is offered. Email invitations will note if compensation is offered for a specific survey. ”

I did find an interesting issue on my “search”. Apparently, there have been big issues with their pop-up, whereby it has locked up more than a few computers. I’ve never experienced the pop-up, but I think Maplaver mentioned that she did. (I block all pop-ups) One guy had to pay the “geek squad” big bucks to remove it from his computer. Sounds like a nightmare. But to be fair, this may be an issue that’s been resolved. I’ve just never heard of a pop-up jamming your computer. You can read about it here, http://www.lockergnome.com/technobabble/2007/07/07/opinion-central-pop-up-ad/

If your going to be up late tonight, I’ll be sending out a post announcing the winner of the April/May $200 Blog contest sometime after midnight. We’ve had a tremendous response, and I’ll be working as fast as I can to check and double check all of the entries! Good luck!