While attending the Graphing Social Patterns conference last week, I heard a fair amount of buzz about a company called Peanut Labs. Only yesterday did I stumble upon their site when I took note of their logo. Now I don’t mean to be childish here but their logo is extremely phallic. Perhaps that was what they were thinking when they designed the logo but they could have been a little more creative and less direct.

So what is Peanut Labs anyways? According to their about us page, “Peanut Labs is a rapidly growing online market research network backed by the investors of Skype, Yahoo eGroups and Delicious.” Ultimately, Peanut Labs is providing a similar service to SocialMedia’s datapoints service that I previously covered on the blog. Peanut Labs enables applications with currencies to reward users with more virtual currency for filling out web surveys. The owner of the application is directly rewarded with cash.

I feel like the marketing programs that are popping up on Facebook are very similar to the “Free iPod” promotions that you see scattered around the web. Thanks to the significant quantity of personal data extracted from these surveys, these marketing systems have become extremely profitable. I’m not sure if I’d use this as my form of application monetization, but one thing is for sure, I’m probably not going to pick Peanut Labs first thanks to their company logo. Am I being to harsh?