We’ve been hearing feedback from the community and noticed in the logs that there are sometimes issues with new user registration.  This has been fixed on our testing servers and we’ll be moving it live in the near future.  If anyone’s had these problems, please check back to see when you’ll be good to go.  Sometimes this error manifests itself by not allowing a new user to login and giving no error message (a double-whammy).

As always, thanks for being cool.

Hey y’all …

Just a note to say we’re aware that Namethis has had a rough go of it this week and we’re working on the stability end of it right now.  We know that winning projects haven’t popped up right away and that there are now SSL issues (same ones as before are back).  It’s got our full attention and we expect to have the Namethis machine purring soon.

Thanks for your patience.  What’s the name for a community that’s full of great feedback … it’s … well … rock … yeah that’s it.  You guys rock!

1000 watts for the best purchase with a Kluster debit card.  Picture or it didn’t happen.

A couple of (as Ben would say) “funky fresh” improvements:

1. Name suggestions are now rate limited.  You can still submit them to your hearts content (or, more accurately, the number of submissions that fit in 48 hours), you just can’t do it all at once.  Hopefully this will be a simple and easy cap that will keep the name explosion down and make it easier to read the page, while still allowing unfettered brainstorming.  We’ll see how it works.
2. The name requester can now choose words that must be excluded by submitters.  Another simple fix that should make it easier to enforce the rules of the namethisee.  Inspiration for this feature came directly from Wilson Lin, on this blog.  Thanks Wilson!

Thanks for all your input, community.  You guys rock.

We’ve received some great feedback from yinz about how you’d like to see namethis improve, and I wanted to kinda summarize those ideas and give you some insight into what we’re thinking.  I also want to make clear that we’re reading, listening, and always trying to find the best ways to improve the site.

The biggest issue from both your and our prospective has been the number of name suggestions.  For a user, a huge page is hard to manage.  It also spreads watts too far around and makes it exceedingly difficult to successfully invest. Furthermore, there’s a problem when the ratio of suggested names to investments is unbalanced.  The best input into our decision algorithm is investment and the huge number of names vs. less investing (beget from an unwieldy page, too few watts in the community, and a trepidation toward losing watts) skews the results.  Various ideas to help solve this issue have been proposed at Kluster headquarters and on the blog including:

• Limiting the names a person can suggest
• Making the namer “pay” watts to suggest names
• Creating multiple competitions to pick (for instance) a top 25 before choosing the top 3
• Changing the payout percentages to give more money to investors and less to the namer
• Capping the total number of suggested names
• Eliminating names which don’t receive any investment or only a small investment after a certain period
• Simply a better explanation of investment
• A two-column layout to prevent the page from getting too long
• Limiting the time during which names can be suggested to allow for an invest-only period before selection.

There’s lots of different approaches to fixing this problem and they’re by no means mutually exclusive.  We want the site to remain fun, we want to pick the best names for our client, and we want the market/competition aspect of investing and brainstorming to be balanced.  We also have to keep in mind that the utility for the client is a limited time span after which they’ll have an answer, that brainstorming is a collaborative enterprise where good ideas build off of each other, and that it’s no fun to be prevented from participating.  Any solution we find has to fit into the very simple interface that we currently have.

Are there better ideas out there that haven’t been listed above?  Is there a strong community preference to any of the above suggestions?

As always, thanks for being a part of this experiment and business.  We hope it’s as much fun for you as it is for us.

Some bad emails went out yesterday for some long closed naming competitions that listed different winners.  Sorry for the confusion.  Our test server penetrated it’s cone of silence and decided to give you updates from the past.

Have a great weekend.

In honor of the 43rd birthday of Dermontti Dawson, soon-to-be hall of fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, we’re celebrating by giving 2000 watts to each community member.

Like Dawson, who made 7 straight Pro Bowls, the Kluster community is filled with all-stars. Since launching NameThis (and as of this blog post), you have proposed 9,030 names and invested 870,000 watts.

Thanks.

We’d also like to thank you for all of your feedback as we build out more exciting features for NameThis, Knewsroom, and the rest of the Kluster portfolio. We have some great things planned and can’t wait to roll them out. Stay tuned.

And one last thing, everyone rush out and grab the latest and greatest browser, Firefox 3. Today is download day and not only can you participate in setting a Guinness Book record by downloading it, it’s also the nicest thing you can for every friendly web developer in your life.

UPDATE: I didn’t realize but I’ve now been made aware that today is also Barry Manilow’s birthday. We here at Kluster, especially Ben, couldn’t let the opportunity pass by. Everyone has received an additional 195 watt bump for Barry Manilow’s 65th birthday. 195 watts because he’s 3 times the man of any of you.

Don’t know if we should build something in to support this behavior directly or not, but I find it’s very useful to invest a small amount of watts into every name that catches my eye. Then I refresh the page and all the names I might want to invest in are all at the top of the page. As the 48 hours counts down, I can scan through only the new names (easy to do with the yellow highlighting) and then I pick my top candidates for bigger investments from among the names I’ve collected which are now in a separate list.

Do you have other good techniques for managing the investment process on namethis?

For those running out of watts on namethis.com, check out knewsroom.com and get participating. There’s lots of watts at stake over on that side, too!

Have a great weekend!

Hot on the heels of the namethis.com launch, less then a week into namethis.com’s life, after a grand total of 3 hours of developers’ sleep … namethis.com has new features. Thanks to your great feedback on this very blog, our fearless leader’s ADD, and some tech elbow grease, we’ve released the following enhancements:

• an rss feed for new, almost finished, and just finished projects
• a twitter feed of the same
• a little more relevant details and some design improvements on the project detail page. now you can see total watts invested the entire time to get an idea of what’s at stake for the winners (investment return-wise). we’ve pulled out your suggested names and your investments into separate sections, so you can review those quickly. we’ve also highlighted the new name suggestions since your last visit. finally, we did away with the stake-per-name until the very end, when you can see your stake in the winners. we didn’t think the information was terribly interesting and relevant the old way, and now with your investments highlighted at the top, you won’t need to scan through a big list to see how you’re doing.
• algorithmic magic which should produce winners even more reflective of your intent (look for a blog post soon from our statistical wizard with some explanations)
• various boring bug fixes, ho hum

Thanks so much for your interest, your projects, your names, your support, and your feedback. Can’t wait to make namethis.com even cooler (stay tuned for loads more interesting features rolling out in the coming week).