Lacy covered the biggest change, about which I’m sure y’all will have plenty to talk about.  Try to keep that discussion there.  I’ll cover the best of the rest in this post.

Comments

There are now comments on each project, right on the Namethis site.  In the past there’ve been lots of discussion on the blog regarding names, whose came first, which are good and bad, etc.  We thought it made sense to move those discussions straight into the projects themselves.  There’s now a toggle in the upper right side of the page to switch between the names view and the comments view.  Keep it civil, keep it fun, keep with the Namethis spirit.  Hopefully this will foster an even tighter community of namers or voters.

Variable Rewards

Another super-exciting addition to Namethis is the ability for clients to increase the reward to the community.  Every project now shows the exact cash splits for winning names for all three place.  Projects with increased rewards will display with a blue plus (plus means even better!).  Because we needed to change the algorithm to scale to various amounts, the initial split is slightly different for $99 projects.  We hope you’ll agree that the chance to make even more money outweighs any negatives from a different split at $99.  And to the clients, our namers are the best around, I think they deserve greater rewards!

Full Archive (w/ stats)

In the past once a project fell off the home page, it disappeared forever.  Now you can go back and look at all the projects that have ever been run, complete with winners, your stakes in your invested-in names, and neat graphs and information (like what times of the day do names get suggested).  There’s also some summary leaderboards at the top of the page and I’m hoping we can add lots more information (ideas?) as time goes by.

Experience Points

Lacy got into this a bit in his post as well, so in a rare attempt at using less words instead of more, I’ll leave you to read more there.  Suffice to say, experience points are the equivalent of rewarded watts that never go away.  They’ll be used to track who’s our most successful community member behind Troy … *grin*

One extra note on experience points, I’d love to hear from the community on different ways we can integrate this into the site (for now they’re only available after each name in the list, blind submissions have been disabled).  We have some thoughts, but we didn’t want to unleash unfettered wholesale upheaval without at least culling your creative craniums.  This is a community where we come together to find the best ideas, after all.  So you tell us, how should we use our shiny new XP?

Analytics

For the most part (speaking for myself) when I write these blog entries, I address them to our community of namers and voters, and not to our clients.  I know there’s probably a lot of overlap and I’m guessing a lot of you namers will someday need things named for yourself, as well.  This next feature is just for the clients, though.

Clients, wouldn’t it be awesome if you had deeper information about why and who loved your name?  Welcome to analytics.  For each name receiving traction, you’ll be able to see the demographic breakdown of its supporters (age, gender, and household income) as well as a tag cloud of their capabilities/interests, and the velocity of voting in the name (Did the name come late with a lot of support?  Was it early and support ebbed as more names were added?).  If anyone wants to see a demo of the information, its available from the start a project page.  Reasons for this feature?  Well, it’s cool and the graphs are kick-ass, but for a concrete example of when it comes in handy, our own Stacy “Mean to Stef” Prince …

Keep-in-touch with Projects

We’ve also given the client the chance to send one message to all participants in the naming (voters and namers) so they can update those interested on their progress.  One of the consistent messages we’ve heard from the community is a desire to find out what’s happened to some of the products and services that have been named.  We’re hoping that clients will take advantage and keep-in-touch.  Balancing a desire to fix that problem with a strong understanding of privacy, these messages are on-site, not directly to your email.  If you’re so configured, you’ll hear that you have a new Kluster message, whereupon you can jump into the discussion, and even partipate in an entire thread as opposed to being the recipient of a one-way message.

I hope you guys enjoy these changes.  I know they’ve been a long time coming and you’ve been anxiously awaiting them.  In the future, we’re going to try to bite off smaller chunks.  A lot of other factors kinda came together to make this a bigger release then we had originally intended.  The other good news is that we’ve layed the groundwork for even more exciting features to come.  I can’t wait to hear how you think we can take advantage of the new experience points for an even better experience.  And while I don’t want to pre-empt any later announcement, there was one big feature that didn’t make this release we have 95% done in our back pockets, that I know you’ll love.  As soon as we can find a partner befitting the excellence of our community, we’ll be able to launch that feature, as well.

Longest blog post ever …

With sparkling tulip love,

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.