I have some exciting things coming up for you guys.

Forums! Each group on Quizlet will have its own private forum, and there will be several global forums. The current global forums are: Quizlet Suggestions and Vocabulary Help. There will be no casual hangout forum spot. Here are some screenshots I’m working on:

The forums main page

A single forums page

Also, I’m working on making the URLs on Quizlet much prettier. I’ve started with a new testimonials page I’ve completed: quizlet.com/testimonials/ - note the lack of “.php” - I’m going to try to make this site-wide soon. We’ll see.

Tell me what you think!

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Update: The Morning After (fix)

So there was a bug in the dashboard page when I updated it around 2 AM last night. It wasn’t allowing you to visit your own dashboard without giving it a user id.

This bug is now fixed. Sorry for the troubles. The total downtime was about 7 hours.

And by the way, the reason this happened is because I was experimenting with some new ways of accessing dashboards. You can now type in id=jalenack to get my dashboard, or use anyone’s username to get theirs. I’m doing this as part of a larger change to eventually get all dashboards to have a structure like this: http://quizlet.com/user/jalenack/ … Again, sorry about all this!

I’m so relieved to have finally sent my Davidson scholarship application. It was a lot more work than I thought it would be…The UPS package I shipped contained 43 pages of juicy Quizlet secrets and documentation, plus a ~10 minute video of me prattling on about Quizlet. But that’s not all - each one of those items was sent in triplicate. So I actually sent 129 pages and 3 DVDs. Pheww. I hope it was all worth it!

But because I can never resist working on Quizlet, even in the face of interminable application papers, I have managed to silently release the following features over the past week:

• Quizlet now works for school or home environments that were having trouble with users being logged on across multiple computers. It seems like there was some content caching at the user router level which I have now prevented.
• Scatter now works in old versions of Firefox (1.0.x). But I recommend upgrading to the latest version of Firefox at firefox.com.

There might have been some other things too, but I forget

Oh, and pretty soon I’ll have that sweet video of me explaining Quizlet online. Stay tuned for that and the next State of The Quizlet. Later!

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Update: Sorry, comments are back.

Quizlet is humming along as usual. Here are some cool announcements:

1. Quizlet reached 10,000 users on Wednesday, March 16. Not too bad for 56 days of existence.
2. I just added a wave of new improvements to Quizlet. Read on.
3. I’m entering Quizlet for the Davidson Fellows scholarship. So far, I’ve written 2.5/4 essays and recorded my video. Wish me luck! (I’ll hope to post my video on YouTube soon.)

For the Davidson scholarship, I’m compiling a list of good testimonials to send them. If Quizlet helps you out, you can help ME out by sending in a testimonial. Much appreciated!

UPDATE: Hmm, I just gave the testimonials some more thought. It would be really cool if people created video testimonials about Quizlet. I know that’s a lot to ask - the reason is that I have to prepare this ~15 minute video about Quizlet and I don’t want to just be a talking head. How awesome would it be to have user testimonials included with the video? If you’re up for it, upload your video to YouTube (or whatever) and post a link in the comments. No longer than a minute would be best. Thanks!

Okay, now what you really want to see:

Improvements

• Added customizable symbols (formerly called accents). Customize your own on your user preferences page.
• Fixed the “Ignore Spaces” option which was completely busted.
• Added [square brackets] to the “Ignore stuff in parentheses” option and got rid of the bug that marked answers wrong when they should have been right.
• Added a good print stylesheet so that printing pages on Quizlet now looks nice. This is especially useful if you want to print from the Test page.
• Fixed some bugs in Test page grading when you have multiple correct answers for each term (and vice versa).
• Create Set/Edit Set page [+] and [-] buttons should show on the same line now.
• Random sets! Click on the Random Set link on the right side of the home page or browse page. It lets you continue random-surfing if you don’t like the first random set you see. Cool!
• Added “Topics” on the Browse page for languages, tests, science, and other stuff.

The suggestions everyone has been sending in have been wonderful. My next big project is to redo the Learn page completely, converting it to mootools and making it more flexible. Stay tuned on that. I also need to add some additional admin tools for group managers.

Hey again. I’m working on a super-slick new preference for customizing your accents and symbols. Any language you enter will be supported. Click on the image below for a preview:

You can enter as many symbols as you want, and they can be anything you want. If you want to enter a Japanese alphabet, for example, just copy and paste all the characters into the “custom” box and click save. Additionally, Quizlet will figure out all the custom accents that your friends (from your groups) are using, so you can just copy theirs. For example, the Japanese Learners can all share their symbols together.

Tell me what you think! This should be available in the next few weeks. Later. -Andrew

If you need a break from studying, check out this interview on folksonomy.org. Enjoy

After the serious philosophical contemplations in my last post, I thought I might freshen the mood with some fun statistics on how Quizlet is doing.

But before I dive in I’d like to thank everyone for the huge flow of ideas coming in through the blog and the feedback box. It’s a little overwhelming, but I think some genuinely good features have been suggested. As always, development is continuing at break-neck pace.

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Today marks the 500th day of Quizlet’s existence. That’s a long time! Sometimes I can’t believe it myself, that I’ve been working on it so long and stuck to it. Of course, 455 of those days were private testing and idea-developing times. The site has only been available to the world for the past 45 days, so all new registrations have been since then.

Speaking of registrations, user signups are continuing to come in at a breakneck pace. On average, it’s about 150 people per day, so as I’m writing the sentence there are 8,533 registered users. If the trend continues, about five more should show up by the time I’m done with this post.

Interestingly, the number of sets created per day has recently surpassed the number of users per day. For example, today we had 185 sets created in the last twenty-four hours. Impressive! I think as the user base grows, older members are moving on to create their second and third sets, while first-timers are still a big portion of the new sets posted.

Here is a graph of the number of users against user age on Quizlet:

The big spike is at age 16, right around sophomore/junior year in high school. It’s interesting to see how this data has changed since I last graphed the ages of Quizlet users. Since the last graph, the college students have definitely been picking up Quizlet more.

The average user answers 61.7% of all the Learn page prompts correctly. That seems decent, but I’m working on ways to improve that average (as in, having people answer correctly more often).

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer has passed up Firefox as the most-used browser on Quizlet, with 52% of all users. Next comes Firefox at 37% and Safari at 7.5%. That’s not too bad, considering internet-wide averages put Internet Explorer at . For more on why I’m complaining about Explorer, see this post I wrote about a bug in Quizlet.

All “Set” pages collectively account for about 40% of all traffic on Quizlet, then the Test, Group, and Learn pages take up another collective 40%. The Scatter page is a little further down the list, but it has by far the most repeated visits, as expected.

Geographically, the citizens of San Diego consistently comes in as the top users of Quizlet:

.

This is just a graph of the last 500 visits on Quizlet, so it’s not completely representative of all traffic. Still, It’s definitely fascinating to see the big community in San Diego and the UK, as well as the large spread on the East Coast and Midwest.

Some quick averages: Mr. Average user has created 0.8 sets, posted 4.3 discussion messages, logged 62.9 scores on the Learn Page, and entered 30.3 terms into Quizlet.

Well that’s all I have for now.

Until next time,
Andrew
Lead Quizletteer