You asked for it, and you got it! I’m happy to announce a new game on Quizlet:

Space Race

The object of the game is to kill words before they cross the screen. You type in your answers (then press enter) into the input box at the bottom, and if your answer matches any of the words scrolling across the screen, it will fade away and die. When a word gets all the way across the screen, it will tell you what you missed and make you type it in. You get to keep playing until you lose 2 words in a row without getting one correct answer.

The game gets harder as time passes - words appear in greater frequency the higher level you get. At some point, it’s just too overwhelming.

You score more points the higher level you are. You can score a lot more points by being correct over a large number of consecutive words. Every miss loses you 10 points.

When you’re done, your high score is saved and compared to everyone else who played Space Race on the same set. Can anyone beat me on the U.S. State Capitals?

To make room for the new game, I decided I needed to redo the buttons for the different study modes. Here’s how they looked before:

And now…

The new kind also has a special effect - it expands when you hover over it.

Let me know what you think!

Update: A couple hours after the release I accidentally broke most studying modes for Internet Explorer users. It should work fine now. Sorry!

Update 2: I’ve adjusted it to wrap text on particularly long words. Hopefully that works better for y’all.

There are a lot of things I’m working on simultaneously, and I thought I’d let you know what they are and how they’re doing.

New Learn Mode
Since I posted a preview of the new learn mode, I’ve been playing with it a lot, and taking feedback from all of you guys, and I’ve decided that design is a little too flashy. It looks really cool, but it’s not quite as useful as the current version. While I’m on the subject, I’m aware that the current learn mode has been having some data errors, and so it is among my first priorities to rebuild the learn mode, mostly to emulate the current version but in a more reliable way.

Quizlet Queries for Quid
A few months ago I started a project to donate. Together we raised more than $720 dollars for schools across the country. Wow! If you visit the project page, you may notice that the total looks less than that. This is because one of the projects we funded got canceled by the teacher, and my donation of $400 was detached from the project, along with a couple other Quizlet donors. It still went to a good cause though - DonorsChoose just redirected the money to other projects.

The other day I got a packet in the mail from a school in Louisiana that had received 7 Scrabble boards because of our donations. It had 30 letters from thankful students and some great pictures of Scrabble action. It was definitely cool to see the direct result of our donations, so thank you all! If I get time I’ll try to post some of the letters.

Reliability and Uptime
I admit, the last 3 weeks haven’t been the greatest in terms of reliability on the site. Since I posted about needing a Systems Engineer, I’ve gotten some good responses. I’m in the process of interviewing several of them now, but I’m also still taking applications. Here’s the craigslist ad. In the meantime, I’ve implemented some improvements to the MySQL architecture that seem to have stopped the daily downtime temporarily, but we still need some robust long-term solutions in place before I’ll be happy.

Advertising
You may have noticed some changes in the advertising displayed on the site. It is my goal not to detract from the quality and message of Quizlet, while still making enough money to support it. I’ve recently banned the “When will you die?” ad, due to user complaints. Please understand that Quizlet has to have ads to stay up, but if you think any of the ads cross the line, please let me know via the “feedback” link in the top right corner.

Press
Quizlet is in several current and upcoming stories in the press. I recently did an interview with PC World that will appear shortly. The reporter has already posted a transcript of the interview on his blog. By the way, I’m 18 now (as of December), not 17 as a few people have reported. I also recently spoke on a panel at SMX West, a search marketing conference. Pictures are here

Translations
Translation of the Quizlet interface is going extremely well. Translations for German, Spanish, and Albanian are all about 80% done, and other languages are in progress as well. Right now I don’t need any more translators, as I want to get the first revision of the translation software live and usable to you before I find more translators.

…And that’s all I have for ya now. There are a couple things I can’t talk about just yet but hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have some special announcements. -Andrew