My longtime friend (and occasional Quizlet user) Jackie and me, at graduation

On Friday the 13^th, I graduated from Albany High School. I know, what a lucky day to graduate, eh? It was a wonderful ceremony, and it feels great to finally be done with mandatory education. Now I have the summer to relax, work on Quizlet, and go on vacation. I still don’t have it all planned out yet, but I probably won’t be going on any massive adventures like last summer. And then in last August, I’ll be shipping off for MIT to start my first classes of college!

I haven’t posted on the blog for awhile, but that’s not for lack of things happening at Quizlet. Quite the contrary actually. Here’s the first big thing:

I’m announcing for the first time, right now, that Quizlet has taken a small investment from angel investors. We’ve spent the last few months working out a deal, and I’m happy to say everything has finally gone through and we’re ready to work together and make Quizlet even greater. Their input will help Quizlet grow to even more users and spur the development of even more useful features on the site.

One of our first tasks was to hire a dedicated support person. She’ll be coming on in about a week, and I’m sure she’ll introduce herself soon. One reason I’ve decided to take this investment is so that I can focus on programming and high-level business stuff. I also expect to be very busy at MIT, so I want to be able to maximize my Quizlet time toward improving the site. That’s not to say I’ll be out of touch with regular Quizlet users - I’ll still be on the site every day - but I’m going to be delegating more of the support tasks to our new head of support.

And because it’s just so hard to write a blog post without announcing some new features, I’ve cooked up some new things for ya’ll:

• A sharing box on the set page. This box makes it easier for you to get your friends signed on and using Quizlet collaboratively.
• Inline editing of the terms and definitions from right on the set page. You just double-click on a term, and it turns into an input box instantly. Hit return or click anywhere outside the input box and your edit will be saved.
• Fixed a long-standing bug that made curly punctuation characters imported from Microsoft Word break when studying. Sets made from now on will not have this problem, but sets made previously will still have it. If you simply click Edit and then Save (without changing anything) on a set with this problem, it will fix itself.
• Speed and memory usage improvements across the board.

And as always, there’s more in the pipeline that I can’t quite share with you. I hope you all are enjoying the summer!