Hey everyone. I’m back!

And guess what today is? …. Quizlet’s birthday! Quizlet launched to the world on January 17, 2007. And I’m very proud to say Quizlet surpassed 100,000 registered users a week before turning one.

I’ve been working on a new version of the Learn mode for quite a while now, and I was hoping to have it out for the big b-day, but that’s not happening. But you do get this awesome sneak peek video of what it’s going to look like! I’m hoping to release it in the next two weeks or so. It still needs a lot of testing and quality assurance.

And in case you’ve been keeping score at home, I’ve been accepted at MIT. Lots of good news these days

I’m back in California, after spending the earlier half of this week visiting colleges in Boston. I fortuitously arrived in Boston only several hours before the Red Sox won Game 7 and clinched their spot in the World Series, so my MIT hosts had plenty to be happy about.

The best way to celebrate the Game 7 victory was inside an elevator.

I had a great time in Boston and it feels like a great place to be a college student. My visit confirmed my suspicions that MIT seems like a great fit for me.

So anyways, I flew back on Wednesday, the first day of the World Series. The tension ran extra high on my flight between Boston and Denver (ergo Colorado) - there was lots of talk of “fleeing Boston.” United was cool enough to patch in a live but crackly transmission of the game through the in-flight radio.

With all this flying time, I had some downtime to work on Quizlet (for some reason, I can never do actual work on planes). I’ve got a complete copy of Quizlet running on my laptop, so I can work on it compulsively whenever and wherever I please. What did I do this time? A lot of really good small stuff:

1. Navigation amelioration: I’ve gotten rid of those easy-to-miss links added to the main navigation bar on certain pages, and replaced them with a sweet second row of navigation below the title of each page. The Familiarize, Learn, Test, Export, My Groups, Dashboard, and Group pages all got the treatment. Hopefully this will make it easier to navigate Quizlet.
2. I replaced the Answers.com lookup links with inside-Quizlet lookup links on the Set page. Activate the links by clicking on the little icon next to each term. Just like the Create Set page and the Quizmarklet, a box will pop onto with a list of definitions. So if you see a word you like on someone else’s set, you can click on the icon and save it into one of your own sets. Notice the linked vocabulary words in this post - they’re set up with this feature as well. Très cool!
3. You can now delete your account if you need to. There’s a link in your dashboard. The delete page gives you the option of leaving your old sets for other people to use, or deleting everything. For security, you’ll need to type in your password before permanently deleting your account.
4. I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.3.1 and moved the RSS feeds to Feedburner (the old feed URLs will automatically redirect). You can now subscribe to this blog by email if you like. I guess you could consider this blog the official Quizlet newsletter…
5. A few speed improvements here and there. I’m aware of intermittent speed problems, and they are being addressed.

Meanwhile…

Quizlet Queries for Quid has had a few interesting twists in the past few days. First, two of Quizlet’s projects are now fully funded and complete! Mississippi’s Bay-Waveland Middle School will be getting a LCD new projector and a fifth grade class in the Bronx will be getting six Scrabble games. These proposals were brought to life in part by Quizlet users! (other people not from Quizlet contributed too.) To date, we’ve raised $550. Impressive…But there’s still $1,962 to go!

I’ve added another proposal to the list to keep us on track for our goal of $2512. This time, we’re helping another hurricane-impacted school (this time in Louisiana) get seven Scrabble sets. I’m working on finding more projects I’d like to support - if you browse through the site and find one you like, post it in the comments. Donate now by clicking on the thermometer and clicking Fund Now on one the proposals in the list. And teachers, submit a proposal to the site and I’ll be happy to post it under the Quizlet Queries for Quid challenge. Man, this DonorsChoose thing is addictive - even Stephen Colbert is doing it now!

Now, my first college application is due Thursday, so I’m going to go finish that…

It’s been a full two years since I first had my little “inventor’s moment.” I was pacing around my living room, having my dad call out vocabulary words and responding with their definitions. It was an inefficient and tedious. It hit me that I could make the process more fun and much faster by creating a computer program to replace my dad. So I built a prototype. It worked beautifully, so I passed it around to a few friends, and soon enough I was spending all my free time building the site.

Fast forward two years, and Quizlet is a worldwide operation. More than two million terms have been entered and studied on Quizlet. Right now there are 61,763 registered users. I find it hard to wrap my head around that number. If all the Quizlet users got together, we’d fill Yankee Stadium and still have a few thousand people left over. And on recent weekdays, close to 1,000 people have been signing up per day. That’s like my entire high school registering itself every day.

So to celebrate Quizlet’s birthday, I added an oft-requested feature to the site: online status. If you’ve been on Quizlet in the last five minutes, a little “on” icon will appear next to your username on these pages: Dashboard, Group, Private Messages, and Set pages. Here is what it looks like: . If you’re offline, no icon will appear.

If you would prefer not to show your status, I’ve added an option to the Preferences page. If you uncheck the “Show online indicator” box, no one will ever be able to see whether you are online or not. By the way, you can always access this page by looking in the top-right corner of the page for the “(prefs)” link.

And unrelatedly…

On Sunday I’m taking off for a college visit to MIT and Harvard. My first application (MIT early action) is due in 13 days! I’ll be getting an inside peek at the two schools, as I’ll be staying with current students and attending classes. If anyone is in the Boston area and wants to meet up (i.e. show a California kid around!), send me a message! I fly back Wednesday, so it’s not a big time window…

Lastly, together we’ve raised $510 for school supplies with the Quizlet Queries for Quid program. It’s a decent sum, but I know we can do better. So don’t hesitate to donate right here, right now.

Unfortunately, one of the proposals (the one to give vocabulary cartoon books to students in Chicago) has expired because it didn’t get funded in time. People who have already donated should now have the option of redirecting their funding to other proposals. To replace that one, I’ve added a great new one that will buy the world’s greatest game for different students in Chicago.

Also, the proposal to buy an LCD projector for a school in Mississippi (the proposal closest to my heart, and the one to which I donated $400), only has 18 days left to raise $911! If we all work together I have no doubt that we can pull that together. If you’re a student and don’t have a credit card, ask your parents if they can help you out. Any donation, no matter how small, helps a lot!

Thank you, everyone. Quizlet is the greatest adventure I’ve ever been on, and you’re all a part of it!

It’s one of those days when I release a bunch of cool stuff!

But before I blow you away, let me remind you that I’m still soliciting donations for the Quizlet Queries for Quid school supply program. We need your help to make it actually happen! The vocabulary cartoon book proposal is about to expire, so your donations can’t wait. Thank you!

I made a video of most of it so you don’t have to look at the boring text below.

Here they are, in order of awesomeness (highest to lowest):

1. dictionary lookup feature! - on the Create Set and Edit Set pages, you can now click the little icon to define the term you just typed in. It will pop up a list of definitions, you choose one, and then click Use Selected Definition, and watch as the definition is filled in for you! If you already have a definition filled in, it will add the definition after a comma.
2. You can now disable the live discusison feature on your sets and groups if you like. Group administrators can go to the bottom of their group pages and uncheck the “Enable live discussion” box under “Admin Settings.”
3. I added a new Frequently Asked Questions page. Post a comment if you think I’ve missed something.
4. The symbols box is now available in Private Messages.
5. Other small bugfixes. (obligatory last item)

Let me know if you like it in the comments!

I just made some great updates to the Quizmarklet. Here’s what it can now do:

• User-contributed definitions. Before, it was just using the (excellent) WordNet dictionary, but I have now expanded it to use the ever-expanding word lists from Quizlet’s users. It only uses words that are in sets open to everyone. User-contributed definitions are marked specially with yellow
• It now has better handling of plural words - so it will pickup on “matrices” as a definition for “matrix” and “cherries” for “cherry.”
• Gmail support! I managed to wade through the jungle of Gmail’s code enough find and correct the problem. The solution - appending a <body> tag to a <frameset> page - was both brilliant and insane (thanks to Fyorl for the tip). To all you programmers out there, I intend to write a blog post sometime soon about creating the bookmarklet.
• Supporting Gmail also means supporting pretty much every webpage on the Internet. If you run into a page that doesn’t work, send me a note in the comments.
• The bookmarklet itself (the thing you save in your bookmarks bar) now has a version number (1.02). Everyone who used the old version should upgrade by resaving it to their bookmarks bar.
• Various compatibility and display fixes were also added.

An interesting tidbit I forgot to mention last time is that the Quizmarklet records the definitions you save to Quizlet (from the official dictionary only, not the user-contributed stuff). It will then rank the most often chosen definition and show them at the top of the list. This has two benefits: 1) You see the most ‘universal’ definition first. 2) I get some stat-tracking capabilities to see how I can improve the Quizmarklet.

I still consider the Quizmarklet to be in “pre-release” mode, meaning it’s not finished. That means I’m still changing things, and I’m not going to promote it outside of the blog for now. But when it’s ready, I think it has a lot of potential to be a part of Quizlet’s core functionality/workflow. More on that later…

Lastly, I had some trouble getting it started up in Internet Explorer. I only use Macs, so it’s hard for me to dig into the problem. I have access to both version 6 and 7 of IE via Parallels, but I have this strange feeling that they’re not behaving like regular IE. I can get the bookmarklet to boot up on the Quizmarklet’s page itself, but I can’t get it to save into the “Links” bar via dragging. I can circumvent that by going to “Add to Favorites” and selecting the links bar, which saves the Quizmarklet correctly. But then it doesn’t seem to function at all. So if anyone has some insight or wouldn’t mind helping to discover the problem, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks! I hope you enjoy the new version. Let me know how it goes for you, as always.

How often do you crack open a dictionary when you see a word you don’t know?
Probably never.

So, what can Quizlet do about that?
More than you can possibly imagine. Muahahaa

Friends, meet the awesome that is THE QUIZMARKLET:
(to clarify, ‘awesome’ is a noun in colloquial teenage slang these days)

(Get it here: The Quizmarklet)

Enough hyperbole. Here’s what the Quizmarklet does:

Short story: You find a word you don’t know on any web page, you select the word and activate Quizmarklet, which then defines the word for you and lets you save it to Quizlet for later studying.

Long story: You drag the Quizmarklet onto your bookmarks bar in your browser. Then you browse to any old website on the Internet and discover a word you don’t know. So you select the word and click on the Quizmarklet link you added. Then some magic happens…

In a box overlayed on your current page, a list of definitions gets displayed. It’s an instant dictionary! But that’s not all…

You search through the definitions it gives you, find one you like, and click on it. Then you can save your word/definition pair directly into your Quizlet sets. To do that, you select a set (or have it automatically create a new one) and then click the “Save to Quizlet” button. The word and definition get saved for later use, and you can be on your way surfing the Internet once again.

The Quizmarklet is particularly useful for people who are studying for say, the SATs, and who need to bulk up on general vocabulary as fast as possible. They can be surfing the web as normal, and then *BOOM* whenever they come across a word they don’t know, the definition and permanent storage is only a click away.

Okay, I’m done with the promotion now. The nitty-gritty: The Quizmarklet is something I cooked up all this weekend, so it might be a little rough around the edges. Please let me know if you discover any websites it DOESN’T work on - or ones where it looks funny. It’s using a custom installation of the amazing (and free!) WordNet dictionary. It has over 200k terms listed. Note: The Quizmarklet does NOT use user-generated words and definitions from the main Quizlet website (yet).

When I consider it ready for mainstream Quizlet usage, I’ll promote it elsewhere on the site. But for now, you, my loyal blog reader, get the first chance at this spanking-new feature. Enjoy!