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.

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.

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!