We launched this product with Politico (our media partner) a couple weeks ago, and we wanted to get YC opinion on it. Think office pools for the presidential primaries and the winners earn Amazon.com gift certificates and a trip to the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

This product was not our YC submission because we had already inked the deal before submission.

What do you think of the app and the market? Be honest, we want criticism more than anything. We've focused on political games, but found that political consumers are huge news hounds (see huffingtonpost and drudgereport). Should we spin off as stand-alone site and not be a vendor with other internet media?

Nice! I think politics is a smart thing to get into in terms of sites. It's easy to get people hooked, has broad appeal, and you have a bunch of new content all the time in terms of what's going on, beyond just the user generated stuff.

Talking about the ease of use so much feels like you're insulting the user's intelligence. If you just make it easy to use and don't mention it, maybe the user will feel like a genius.

Yeah, that's not me. It's the video blogger from the Politico.

There is no 'Sign up' next to the login. Are you guys still in private beta/alpha? I am using flock 1.0.5.

Users just click Play Now. They don't need to sign in to make their initial predictions. We only make registration occur until absolutely necessary so we can save the prediction.