Hey all. Andrew here. It’s been a busy December and January for Quizlet. I have a few important announcements.

First and most importantly is that we’ve just hired our first full-time developer and product manager, Phil Freo (seen above with me at the Crunchies awards). Phil recently graduated college and has agreed to move to San Francisco from Florida to work full time for us at our SoMa office. See also: Phil’s announcement on his blog. I’m very excited about this because Phil is a talented developer and can really help step up the pace of innovation at Quizlet. I’ll still be spending a lot of time on Quizlet as well, but as a full-time student at MIT, my time is somewhat constrained. You can look forward to seeing lots of cool new things in 2010 that will be a direct result of Phil’s work.

One thing we’re going to focus on is improving reliability. When so many people depend on Quizlet to study, any downtime hurts. In 2009, we had uptime of 99.42%, which may seem good, but is actually pretty mediocre. A good starting goal for 2010 is to hit at least 99.9% and hopefully even better. We’re adding monitoring infrastructure and doing capacity planning to make sure that happens. I’ve just completed a major code revamp on Quizlet that reduces database queries by 20-30% and increases our ability to innovate rapidly, as well as fixing a major issue with our Facebook login system. With Dave Margulius as Quizlet CEO and Phil working for us full time, we’ve put a lot of tools in place to make 2010 an extremely productive year.

Now, what’s next? We’re finally going to launch an upload-to-Quizlet images feature in the next few days. We’re also going to restart our work on getting the Quizlet interface translated into multiple versions, which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And a lot of you have asked about iPhone and other mobile devices, to which I say we’re still working on it, but it’s one thing we really want to focus on this year.

Overall, our goal is to grow Quizlet as big as we can this year. We want to reach as many students as possible, because we think Quizlet is great and could be helpful to a lot more students. We’ve gotten tens of thousands of testimonials from people who love and rely on Quizlet to study, and we’re addicted to the warm fuzzies that gives us! We’re also committed to maintaining a great free product. We will be adding more premium upgrades/services this year, and I’m personally looking forward to all the site enhancements that additional revenue will be able to fund. We’ll be re-investing almost all of that money into making Quizlet even better. If you like what we’re doing, consider supporting Quizlet with a donation.

Lastly, I had dinner at a chinese restaurant this evening, and I got a curious fortune:

Let’s hope so! Here’s to a great 2010, and thanks for using Quizlet!

-Andrew

P.S. I forgot to mention, but about two weeks ago we also made a switch from built-in MySQL search to Sphinx search, which is an extremely fast search engine. Searches that used to take 4.00 seconds now take 0.01 seconds. You might have noticed that search was down a few times in favor of (relatively poor-quality) google search results. Search used to take up so much processing and time that it was bringing the rest of the site to a standstill. That won’t happen again. The search page still isn’t as blazing fast as I’d like it to be (there are some parts of search that sphinx doesn’t do right now), but it’s much better than before. For an example, check out our nursing flashcards.

This is my first post on the Quizlet blog, and I want to use it to wish Andrew Happy Birthday (it was yesterday). I called him yesterday, thinking I’d just get his voicemail since he’s super busy with school this week. I was going to sing happy birthday on his voice mail. But then he picked up, but he was tired and in the middle of something else, so it didn’t really feel like a birthday call.

So I’m saying it now: Andrew, Happy Birthday! It’s a big one. Hope you had fun last night…

Andrew and I have been working together for almost three years, and on Quizlet for almost two. I’m continually amazed by both his technical capability and his clear vision for Quizlet as a fun, free, and easy-to-use way to study. Recently I signed up as CEO of Quizlet, primarily to help Andrew handle Quizlet’s growth. We’re adding thousands of new users everyday, getting lots of requests for new features and bug fixes, and have lots of things we want to do (e.g. new games, mobile apps, image uploading) to make Quizlet an even better experience. My job is to help that stuff happen faster.

Speaking of faster, you may notice the site running faster today. We’ve been having a problem with our search technology the past few days which has slowed the site down. Andrew was able to fix it this morning, so it should be better now.

Anyway…

Happy Birthday Andrew!!!

Dave

Four years ago I created Quizlet in my living room as a way to study French more efficiently. Today, it’s easily world’s largest flashcard studying site (despite what others say  ), with over 1 million unique visitors per month and the world’s largest database of flashcards, with over 42 million terms entered into 1.5 million sets. We also have visitors from 215 different countries every day, and literally thousands of testimonials from happy users. Above is our original logo.

Some of the highlights along the way:

• On March 13, 2006, I wrote:

Woohoo! Quizlet is about to pass 50 users. It’s great that 16 of you guys are in my French class . I’ve been weeding out little bugs here and there…

• A month and a half later, I wrote:

Quizlet feature development is coming to an end. It has been successfully demoed for a lot of people and may be reaching its release stage in the next stage.

• Of course, Quizlet feature development has never stopped and it still took another 9 months to launch the website in January 2007. Here’s the blog post from launch day. Below is a screenshot of an early version of Quizlet (it still looks pretty similar!)
• The time we raised $1,080 for low-income schools across the country in our Quizlet Queries for Quid campaign.
• Here’s a look back at our second birthday.

• Me getting into MIT partly as a result of Quizlet and my interview with the MIT Alumni magazine, Spectrum.
• Getting on national television with the Early Show in April 2008.
• We recently launched Quizlet images, and we’re still working on them, but I think they’re pretty cool. How well do you know your U.S. President portraits?

Now, an announcement. Yesterday I signed on Dave Margulius, who has been working with me on Quizlet as an investor and advisor for the past couple years, to be CEO of Quizlet. We now have an office in San Francisco with a few people working on Quizlet every day. It’s great to have Dave on the team to help grow Quizlet as a business and a great piece of software. Quizlet has great plans for improvement and growth in the next year, so stay tuned.

Alright, that’s all for now, hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

-Andrew Sutherland, founder of Quizlet

Every day for the last couple weeks has been a record traffic day for us at Quizlet. It’s awesome to see so many people using Quizlet — we now have over 500,000 registered users and 3,000+ new ones per day. Quizlet users have uploaded more than 33,000,000 flashcards. Our traffic has grown 80% just over last week. Nice work, guys!

Some of you may have noticed some spotty service on Quizlet in the last few days. We’ve simply become overloaded with our popularity. Unfortunately for us, that means we have to bring the site down briefly to add more server capacity. We’re going to do this sooner rather than later — i.e. TODAY!

We’re expecting to go down around 5pm EST for as many as 5 hours (if all goes well, it’ll be less). We’ll be keeping everyone updated on our quizlet twitter feed. We know it’s short notice and extremely inconvenient, so thank you very much for your patience.

Today we’re announcing some major new functionality on Quizlet: image-based studying. It’s been one of our all-time most requested features, so we’re super excited to make it available to every one. On Quizlet so far, everything has been plain text: you type in a word, and you type in a definition. Now you can study visually.

One of the major upgrades is to the “create set” page that let’s you enter flash cards. Here’s what it looked like before:

Here’s what it looks like now:

The import data and flip terms links are easier to find, the auto-definer is easier to use (that’s what the mysterious question mark used to do). If you didn’t know, the auto-definer looks up definitions in a dictionary (Source: WordNet), and also pulls up definitions that other users entered (but only in public sets). And overall, the input boxes are wider so you can fit more data in visually without scrolling.

But that’s just cosmetic — the really cool thing is the new “add image” feature.

All you have to do is click “add image” and we automatically find you an image from Flickr, an awesome image hosting service with a great developer platform and lots of Creative Commons-licensed images that let us use the images for free, as long we credit the authors (which we do).

Of course, if you don’t like the first image that pops up, you can get the next one.

Or the next one…and so on. You can also refine your search, so if you don’t like any of the images, you can type a special search in the “Find Images” box that is independent of your term and definition.

Also, you can use just images and have no definition, or you can use Quizlet like before without images, or you can use both at the same time. It all works seamlessly.

Now, how about studying? Images are fully integrated into all the existing study modes. Check it out:

Familiarize:

Learn:

Test:

Scatter

Space Race

It’s wicked cool. If you want to play with a real live image set, check out this list of french animals with images. I hope to add more FAQs and a showcase of image sets so you can see more examples — the possibilities are limitless.

One really cool use-case is for foreign language and english-as-a-second-language (ESL) learning, where you may have 30 students in a class who come from 8 different countries. If you were to say a fish is something that swims in the water, that wouldn’t be useful, partly because the students wouldn’t necessarily all understand the english definition to an english word. But with pictures, well, they speak for themselves.

Now, you may be wondering, can you upload your own images instead of using Flickr?

Not yet, but you will be able to soon. We plan to allow uploading images very soon as a paid upgrade. As always, Quizlet will remain free to all users and we won’t be removing any functionality for non-paying members, but we may be adding some additional powerful features to paying members. We will have more information on this soon.  Uploaded images would be especially useful to medical school students who need to study special diagrams or art history students who need to study obscure paintings or sculptures.

Also, our thanks to the people who have become friends of Quizlet by donating to Quizlet. Their support has helped make this feature and other future upgrades possible.

Developers: Look for an update to the Quizlet API in the next week or so with image abilities.

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated the blog, so it might be hard to believe that a lot of work has gone into Quizlet since the last post. We’ve made the Quizlet search engine a ton better, we’ve added some exciting new technology that does voice recognition (more on that later), and made a lot of performance enhancements to keep the site running as growth increases.

Now, as we head into summer (and the accompanying dive in traffic as people get of school), we have the opportunity to experiment with lots of cool new features. We’re building a lot of cool tools set to be done before the summer is up — one of which we’re ready to announce today:

The Quizlet API is now available! For those who don’t know, API stands for Application Programming Interface. The Quizlet API is a tool that lets programmers develop tools that work with Quizlet’s massive content library (we now have about 30 million flashcards on our site!) This will let people build cool things like cell phone applications and screensavers that use Quizlet data. Developers have been asking for this for years, so it’s great that it’s finally available.

The Quizlet API is free to use and only requires you to be a registered Quizlet user (which you can also get for free). This is our first release so you may not be able to do everything you want just yet, but you should find that it’s surprisingly powerful. If you have suggestions for stuff we should add or bugs you find, please post a comment in the blog.

Are you a developer? Get started here.