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!

It’s the day you’ve all feared.

The Ads have arrived!

The dreaded. The unsightly. The annoying. The Online Ad.

Quizlet’s different, hopefully?

I’m now experimenting with a little advertising on Quizlet.

You know what I hate? Big stupid flashy banner ads. I bet you do too. So Quizlet doesn’t have those ads. It now has nice, unassuming, text ads. They should be relevant the page material as well - an ad on an SAT set might have a link to an SAT studying website. As the ads get more established on Quizlet, they’ll become more relevant. They might be a little off-topic for now, so sorry about that.

Right now, there are ads in three places: the top right corner of the home page (for logged in people), a small one at the footer (for all pages, except the sign up and create/edit set pages), and a medium-sized one in the middle of the set page.

I want to stress that this is an experiment. If the ads get in the way, I’ll get rid of them. Running Quizlet is cheap, but not free. And hey, why shouldn’t I make money on what I’ve created? Just remember - it’s users first, money second. Ya, something like that.

I know this might be controversial, so I really really want to hear what you think. Hit up the comments

This past week I’ve been working on a lot of little things, fixing bugs and tweaking some text stuff. Thanks to everyone who has sent in bug reports - they’ve been very very helpful. But I’d like to take the opportunity to give a quick demonstration of a new game I’m working on for Quizlet - codenamed “Scramble.” But I’m not set on that name, because I think it’s too close to the already-addictive “Scatter.” So here’s a very very early rough draft:

Link to demo video

The point is to unscramble the letters to form words. Obviously, there should be some text to show you the definition of the word you’re forming.

So that’s alright, but after playing it…it’s not that fun. So I’d like to ask YOU - what do you think would make this game more fun? What new aspects would make it more fast-paced?

And also, if you can think of any other game ideas, I’d love to hear them. Post in the comments…
-Andrew

So it’s spring break.

And I’ve been filming a zombie thriller instead of doing my homework! My bloodiness looked a lot more realistic when it was first applied, so that picture doesn’t really do it justice. Anyways, I can post a link to the video when it’s finished :).

But that’s just my day job. I’ve been working madly on Quizlet by night. I have one new big thing right now. It’s the thing you’ve all been waiting for…

Pretty URLs

Yes, it’s probably the least requested feature day-to-day. But oh the goodness of saying:

quizlet.com/set/123/

instead of

quizlet.com/set.php?id=123

Awesome, huh? The whole site has been converted to these more pleasing URLs. So ../learn/.. will do the learn page, and ../familiarize/.. will do the familiarize page. Cool.

And never fear, your old links using the old URL scheme will still work, so you don’t have to change any of your blog posts or anything like that.

Let me know if you have any problems. I changed a LOT of stuff…

It’s all a cruel joke!

Quizlet is free and will remain free indefinitely. Sorry to those who took me seriously

On a serious note, Quizlet’s only recurrent expense is the web hosting account that Quizlet.com runs on. I can keep supporting it on my own for a long long time. Thanks for your concern.

But I am talking with a few people about advertising deals, so we’ll see about that.

-Andrew

[[ Ok, to make this extra clear, all of the following information is completely FALSE. It was my little April Fool's joke ]]

I have been trying to hold this off as long as possible, but the choice has finally caught up with me. I just got off the phone with my accountant and several advisors. The news isn’t pretty.

To put it simply: Quizlet has run out of money.

From the beginning, I have funded Quizlet out of my own pocket. My dad and I have paid for all of the servers, the domain name (it was already taken, so it cost me a very large sum to get it), incorporation costs, and miscellaneous costs associated with running a business - not to mention the thousands of hours I have spent programming and designing.

The original business plan was to start advertising on the site once it attained a sufficient quantity of users. We (my dad and I) knew very clearly that we could not support it on our own indefinitely. So we set about actively pursuing advertising deals with educational companies looking to advertise for what we thought was a very attractive demographic: highly motivated students from elementary school all the way to college. But the interest at these companies was simply not there. So we were left to figure out a back up plan. As the founder of Quizlet, it was my choice to decide what to do next.

I had to choose between three options:

1. Charge for Quizlet.
2. Put up generic advertising from Google or another ad publishing company
3. Shut it down permanently.

Obviously, this was not an easy choice to make. I wished to do none of these.

After running some very careful analysis and consulting several other web companies, I reached the conclusion that having generic advertising deals would bring in too little money to cover the costs of daily operations. So #2 was eliminated immediately.

The last thing I wanted to do was shut Quizlet down. Over the past seventeen months, I have poured my entire life into working on Quizlet. It has become so much a part of me that to just turn it off would be like turning off a part of myself. I know that may sound cheesy or whatever, but Quizlet is so important to me. So, I think you get the point, #3 was out as well.

Which leaves me with making users pay to use Quizlet.

So here’s the plan: Individual users will be able to subscribe to a whole year of Quizlet for $30. That rounds out to only 11 cents per day. Teachers and school districts will be able to purchase bulk packages of 35 accounts for $180. To put it in perspective, that is an 83% discount for the bulk package. These price points will be discussed in depth in a future blog post.

Payment will be exclusively online and will require a credit card or a Paypal account.

The timeline for the subscription phase-in is as follows:

1. April 5, 2007 - Free registration will end. Already registered users will have full access privileges and may continue using the site as normal. New and current users will be able to start paying for their one-year subscriptions.
2. May 5, 2007 - All registered users who have not paid the subscription fee for Quizlet will have their accounts severely restricted. They will have the opportunity to use the Export page to remove their data from Quizlet for another 2 months, and then their accounts will be completely deleted.

But there is some good that will come out of charging for Quizlet. First, it will allow me to immediately start hiring other programmers that will be able to add great new features like image learning. As always, there are many features I want to add to Quizlet, and the improvements to Quizlet will only quicken as more people join the team. Having paying users will also let me hire a dedicated support staff (probably just one person to begin with) which will be able to answer questions and resolve issues more immediately than the current situation.

I will be available for questions in the comments of this blog post. Again, I am deeply sorry for having to make this choice.

UPDATE: Lastly, everything I just said is a COMPLETE JOKE. Quizlet will always be free. Happy April Fool’s day, everybody!