Ever wish you could get your hands on Grays Sports Almanac from Back to the Future, rise to stardom and create your own version of Biff’s casino? There is no doubt about it, predicting the future has always had big bucks riding on it.

If you think your crystal ball is working well – in politics, economics, sports or even pop culture – you may want to check out Predictify.com. It caught my eye as an interesting concept after a friend of mine asked me to sign up last month.

It’s a simple way to pose deterministic questions to a large audience. The mob has their shot at predicting the future outcome of an event. If your prediction comes true you’ll get reputation points based on accuracy and, at times, a small monetary reward.

The more accurate your responses are the more reputation you’ll gain. But don’t bank on being the next Biff by answering questions correctly. The average payout of a correct response is $1. It may not be much, but it encourages participation and gets your appetite wet for staying in the game.

To be clear this isn’t a form of betting. It’s actually a pretty cleverly designed research tool. You can ask any question you want without putting up any dough. But if you do pay you can view graphs of profile data that include age, gender, education, political affiliation and race. With the paid method you can also choose to keep the results private.

Questions range from: Who will win the 2008 Presidential election?, How many touchdowns will Tom Brady throw this season?, to Who will win the upcoming season of American Idol?

The concept hinges on creating a competitive environment where regular Joe’s feel comfortable giving up their answer. As they’ve mentioned, studies show that a diverse crowds responses are often more accurate than a small group of experts at predicting future events. Plus they’re a hell of a lot cheaper at $1 a pop.

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