First of all, I’d like to publicly and clearly and unequivocally thank Troy for all of his hard work and creativity.  He’s a big part of the success of namethis and we here at HQ appreciate him immensely.  He’s gotten a lot of guff in the community and I think a lot of it is unfair.  He has never won in anything resembling a suspicious matter.  He doesn’t invest his huge bounty of watts unfairly.  But most of all, he comes up with lots of great names.

Moving on, some info about the “Troy rule” or blind submissions.  In the 12 projects since blind submissions were implemented, Troy’s placed in 11 of them, with multiple placings in 3 and one first place win.  In the 12 projects previous to blind submissions, Troy placed in 11 of them, with multiple placings in 10, and 6 first place wins.  This is all very unscientific because I haven’t compared his rate of naming in each of those time periods, nor the rest of the communities, etc.  I haven’t looked at investment.  I simply looked at winners.

It’s a small sample set, so we can’t read too much into it, but I’m not sure there’s been a huge difference.  There’s been less multiple placings since blind submissions were implemented, whatever that might mean.  Hopefully this piece of evidence is yet another supporting piece of statistics which show that, in fact, the algorithm is doing it’s job and is not being gamed.

I know the easiest reaction is to assume that things are terribly unfair, but oftentimes, that’s just not the case.  I’ve tried to be as helpful and transparent as I can in answering questions on competitions and responding to concerns about methodology.  Kluster loves and appreciates all the feedback from this wonderful community.  We know this is a two way street and the whole premise of crowd sourcing is founded on the fact that we have a totally kick ass crowd — and we do!  Keep in mind that we’re all in this together, to produce great results, to have a fun time, to share the money you’ve earned by your brainpower, creativity, influence and dedication.  Keep the great feedback coming pertaining to what we can do to improve things.  I’m sure our oldest (in terms of Kluster participation) community members will agree that we’ve been really responsive to suggestions in shaping future features.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to see what the effect of blind submissions is and evaluate it as we roll out some new features.

Carry on … unicorns …

While some of the card load errors a few weeks ago were technical problems… The current issue is a lack of funds in Payoneer’s account.

Don’t be scared, kluster is doing just fine…. Unfortunately, though, our link with Payoneer became broken recently when we moved our bank account from Vermont (where kluster used to be headquartered), to New York (where kluster is now currently doing business).   We thought that we would still be able to wire money from our Vermont account to Payoneer via our online banking, but unfortunately our bank in vermont (TD Banknorth) will not accept neither that, nor my phone authorization to wire money… Which ticked me off beyond belief… So much so that I believe I lectured them about the existence of the internet and their need to embrace it yada, yada yada.

So, I scrambled this morning with our new recruit, Stef (welcome her in the comments)  and went to open a bank account here in NY… Since I cannot wire money from Vermont… We have to wait for the money from vermont to find it’s way down to New York the old fashioned way (a check). Once that happens we can fund our Payoneer account and you guys will all be able to make your withdrawals.

You asked, now you know.  We will be back up and running with this in 48 hours or so.  This is totally sucky, i apologize.

I’ll post again with an update as it comes in.

hello again klusterers.  Don’t worry, we’re listening. 

Our fancy math machines were trained to notice suspected ”pile on’s” and suppress the value of investments in those ideas… Now, we still are pretty confident that it is doing its job.. but we saw an idea pop up in the comments      and we decided to give it a shot real quick.    For the next 3 to 5 days name this submissions will be blind during the investment period, with the namer only to be reviled when the project has ended. 

If this yields better results, and happier comments… then we will consider keeping it.

It is important to understand that we should not mind seeing the same person win over and over, as long as the ideas are supported by a large and diverse group of people.   Good ideas are good ideas, the name behind them does not matter… which is why this blind submission idea is a great experiment for us.

Happy naming, keep on-top of us in the comments.

As for all of the other issues brought up lately (domains, payments, leprechauns etc), we are on them all and expect to have a major roll out with all new versions of kluster and namethis within the next week or so.

Every student in my high school public speaking class could have given a better speech than McCain,

Ben

PS:  anyone who helps us convince mike lacy to vote obama gets 10 million watts. 

For those of you who twitter, you can follow along with namethis by … well … following @namethis.  All new projects are announced and reminders of time running down are announced as well.  It’s a great way to spread the coolness that is namethis throughout the internets, to all your best buds.

Also, it’s really hard to not tell you guys about all the new features coming down the pike, and I also hate to over promise, but we still got a hopper full of cool, new stuff for yinz, real soon now.  I’m guessing later this week, early next week will be the time frame that it starts hitting the production site.

Unicorns and daffodils,

Hi y’all.  Wanted to give you a heads up on the new Namethis feature: uniqueness.  We’re using some magic special sauce behind the scenes to determine how unique a Namethis suggestion is across the Internet in comparison with the other suggested names on the site.  We’re hoping this information leads to more informed investing and better winners.

We’ve had lots of talks, the community and Kluster, about improving the site and rules that can be put in place to make for even better results.  One of the unnamed variables in the equation is whether we can be as impactful in our improvements without changing the fundamental rules of the game.  This is an attempt to do exactly that, we’ll see how it works out.

Also included in this release are some small fixes around duplicate names.  We tried to make the net a little wider to catch more possible dupes (including some of Stacy’s suggestions).  There were also some small UI fixes here and there.

Keep tuned in over the next couple of weeks as we bump up the Namethis awesomeness (even more, if it’s possible).  We’ve got a lot brewing in our labs that I’m quite confident you guys are gonna like.  There’s a certain feature in particular that I imagine is gonna cause a bit of a stir … but I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so I’ll stop short of any more hints.

As always, with love …

Come on people.  I had SOOO many good name suggestions for the LoneRider beer name and none of them won.  That’s just not fair!  I used to think that we had the best community around, but now I’m not too sure … *grin*

I do have to admit that Brewtality was pretty good, though.  Fun times, at least.  Thanks for the great project LoneRider.

Does anyone use it?

Does anyone like it?

Hello everyone.

Sorry for the delay in making this post… I’ve spent the last few days reading and digesting all of your comments, and thinking strongly about your request for lifting the monthly payment limits.

Unfortunately, though, after looking at the data… it is not something we are ready to do.  Although the first card loads last month worked seamlessly for many, we had failures/errors on about 36% on last months load requests, which kept Twentyman busy debugging our communications with payoneer, etc.   I am not ready to take this out of test mode until we are seeing this working much more smoothly.  

For what it’s worth, I want nothing more then to lift this payment limit.. It is extremely valuable to us as an organization to have core evangelists, and ironically, those are the few that are being hurt by the payment limit… which pains me. 

While we are happy with our progress so far, we TRULY appreciate you hanging in there with us as we really perfect the complex logistics associated with paying thousands of people and interfacing between 4 parties (banks, card processors, kluster front end, and our accounting platform) .    

In the words of our great president… “it’s hard work, we’re workinn’ hard”

You guys rock, hang in there.  we’re on it. 

b

Lacy’s working on deletable criteria/hangovers. I’m working on namethis analytics. Ben’s working on caffeinating so he can ask what we’re working on twice a minute.

We are the bloggiest team in the mutha uckin world. In other words, coffee line + iphone = blog.

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