In the spirit of all the change and reform being bandied about this election season, we here at Kluster have decided that the best way to bring it about is not through pontification, but by taking a stand, throwing something against the wall and seeing if it sticks.  Evolution, baby.  As William Edwards Deming, famed statistician and arbiter of productivity improvement, once said:

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

We’ve been paying close attention to everything that you all have said about our beloved little baby NameThis and the winners produced by the investing system and algorithm currently in place.  First and foremost, thank you.  Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback and criticism you’ve shared with us.  You’ve challenged us to rethink what we’ve done and change it (blind submissions, uniqueness filters, naming speed limits, etc.) as we collectively gained a better understanding of klusterbot and its whims.  Without you, it’s just a few of us stuck in a Ben Kaufman karaoke echo chamber.

That said, we’ve been busier than a one legged arse kicker reconfiguring the klusterbot and I want to take a moment to introduce to you what we hope will be an improvement not only to the NameThis experience but also to the quality of winning names.  In a nutshell, we’re scrapping watts and the investing scheme in its entirety and replacing it with a brand spanking new voting system which is intended to facilitate a more democratic process by which names are selected and their supporters compensated for their work.

First a few words about the decision to replace watts and investing.  What we liked about it was the inherent risk-reward decision making that it forced users to engage in.  Earning a big reward required putting up a large stake of watts in a name.  Smaller investments yielded smaller returns, much like the real world.  The problem though arose from the fact that (a) only three winners were chosen per project and (b) if you invested in a losing name, you lost your watts.

With hundreds of names being submitted, it was very difficult to consistently invest in a winning name given the sheer quantity of choices.  Over time, unless you were exceptionally good at picking winners (or piling on to Troy’s names), your watts disappeared and you were effectively out of the game.  What we saw was a disappearing middle class, a population of users being quickly divided into the have-watts versus the have-watt-nots.  And when relying on our community to parse and validate the suggested names, we found that the more users playing the game, the better.  Thus the decision to switch to a cumulative voting system.

The way it works is simple.  For each project, you get 10 times the number of winners in votes to allocate as you wish across the names submitted (for namethis, that would be 30).  You can put up one vote each for 30 names in order to spread your risk, or you can really show your support for a name by throwing all 30 of your votes at it.  Any permutation in between these two extremes is also possible.  They are your votes.  Exercise them as you please.  Oh, and change them as much as you want until the polls close (i.e. the project ends).  You, literally, have nothing to lose and only ca$h to gain.

Once a project ends, the votes are tallied and the names with the most are declared the winners.  In terms of rewards, what you earn for supporting a winning name is tied directly to how many votes you put at risk supporting it.  If you bet the bank and throw all 30 of your votes at a winning name, your reward will be much greater than if you had played it safe with just a single vote.  This, we feel, evens the playing field and encourages greater participation while still preserving the risk-reward structure of watt investing.

Now, for all of you who have had success and earned some watts, don’t fret over them going away.  We are also introducing a new system of experience points that tracks your namethis performance much as watts did in the old system … and we’ve even been so kind as to convert your watts for you.  The more winning names you submit and support, the more points you get.  In time we will be adding new features such as leaderboards and influence levels to namethis in order to bubble up the awesomest of the awesome and reward them for kicking so much bootay.

So, enough words for now.  My attention span is waning and caffeine consumption is imminent.  Kick this new system around, rock the vote, and earn some cash.  As always, spammers and gamers will have a special spot reserved for them on the sole of my shoe when I kick them off the internets.  The rest of you, we love unconditionally.

Now go make a difference … and vote.

Some quick updates for all you klusterers out there. We added a few small things to private klusters that should help both administrators and users alike to generate and filter out the best of the best ideas.

In no particular order other than that from which they spill out of my brain, they are:

• Project editing ability for admins. Change the name of the project, the description, its criteria, and when it ends. Whenever, to whatever. No more perfect typing necessary on the first try.

• Admins can also remove projects from the list of completed projects if so desired.

• Comment threads for submitted ideas. Think an idea sucks, bam, comment. Love another idea, bam, another comment. Want to riff on a half-baked idea, bam, done.

As always, if you love ‘em or hate ‘em (or us), please let us know.

Love,

team kluster

Quick update for any of you out there that signed up for your own private kluster.  We had a bug crawling around our servers that was preventing people you invited from signing up and joining the kluster.  We have since exterminated it with a turbocharged logic bomb and things should be back to normal.

If you find anything else, please don’t hesitate to let us know.  Either drop some comments here or email us at team@kluster.com and we will love you forever.  Cheers!

1898 - Joshua Slocum became the first person to successfully circumnavigate the earth alone when he landed his sloop Spray in Newport, R.I., a 46,000-mile trip.

1950 - President Harry S. Truman ordered the Air Force and Navy into the Korean War.

1969 - Police and gays clashed at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, fostering the gay rights movement.

2003 - The national do-not-call registry, formed to combat unwanted telemarketing calls and administered by the Federal Trade Commission, enrolled almost three-quarters of a million phone numbers on its first day.

2008 - namethis.com surpasses 20,000 names submitted in a mere 3 weeks of existence - about one every minute if you’re counting - awakening the masses to the creative potential of crowds.  R. Ethan Smith makes $829 in the process.

And it’s a perfect day for baseball.  We should add innings to namethis projects.

See you at shea.

“You have to learn the rules of the game.

And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

~ Albert Einstein

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“Any violation by you of the terms of the foregoing may result in immediate and permanent suspension or cancellation of your account and the

forfeiture of any amounts

otherwise due to you from the Company.”

~ namethis terms of use

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