Hey guys,

In addition to an updated look, we’re launching a feature that lets you view the latest activity on Stirrdup.  See when users update their profiles, submit new stories, comments, upvote a story, and more.  Right now we’re displaying the last few on the Hot and Stirring pages, but we’re going to expand this quite a bit in the upcoming weeks.  Soon you should be able to see what ever member has been up to on their profiles and track all of your friends with a really cool interface we’re working on.

RSS feeds are being worked on as well.

Hey guys,

We’re experimenting a bit with the lengths of the descriptions shown for each story. After having them at 325 characters for the past 6 months, today we’ve shortened them to 225. We think less is more.

The goal is to force ourselves to come up with catchier, more entertaining titles since we won’t be able to fit half the story into the description any longer. Also, it makes all the pages that show multiple stories much more readable, since there isn’t nearly as much text to scroll through. During internal testing we found it made it much easier to find stories that we were interested in.

We’ll test it out and get your feedback. Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Per your request and in the spirit of openness, you’re now able to see everyone who voted for a particular story.  This has been one of the most requested features, so I hope you guys enjoy it.

We also updated the look and feel of the “me too” buttons earlier in the week and everyone seems satisfied.  Usage of them is up somewhere around 3 billion percent.  We’re glad.  I don’t know if we’re going to stick with the “me too” moniker now that it’s more arrow-like, but we’ll see how things go.

Please continue to send us your feedback.  It’s a tremendous help.

We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding the new look of the “me too” buttons.  You say it’s harder to read, you don’t like the way we’re marking the stories submitted by your friends, and that things are awkwardly proportioned.

We’ll work something else out.

Like I mentioned a few days ago, we’ve enabled me too’ing stories from every page where a story can be listed. From the main and stirring pages, yours and your friend’s profile pages, your saved section, etc. We’re working on tweaking a few things visually as this change makes the pages a little more cluttered than we like, so those changes should be live shortly as well. Small tweaks mostly, sizes, colors, etc.

Please give the system a good workout and report any bugs you encounter. Your feedback helps make Stirrdup a better place.

Thanks guys.

UPDATE:  To those asking what happened to the “friend” icon that would display when the story was submitted by one of your friends,  the functionality is still there.  Now the number of points shows up blue instead of black.   We may change this if it continues to confuse everyone, but I figured I’d let you know we hear you.

Thanks to our wonderful friends over at Somethingstore.com we’re holding our first ever contest. We’re giving away  “somethings” to the three Stirrdup members who contribute the most in the month of December.  The winner will receive 3 somethings, second place will receive 2, and third place will get 1.  That’s a whole lot of somethings.

You guys can earn points by posting comments, sharing stories, and referring your friends to join Stirrdup. Since we’ll be running similar contests most months from now on we’ll try to throw together a leaderboard shortly. The contest starts today (Dec 5th) and ends on December 31st.

Since Somethingstore.com has been kind enough to provide the prizes for this month, here’s a little something about the cool service they have:

SomethingStore is a fun new website that operates quite simply: We will send you something, selected randomly among many things from our inventory for $10 (free shipping) and you will find out what your something is when you receive it. So, what will yours be?

• It maybe something you need, something you want or something you desire …
• Your something may be a cool gadget, rare book, table game, handmade necklace, reverse clock, box of gourmet chocolates, set of shiny shower curtains, a popular video game, a big-box retailer gift card, the latest version of a software, or even a set of kitchen knives …
• It may be an apparel item, garden tool, kitchen appliance, a unique home decor item, a piece of jewelry, electronic equipment, a magazine subscription, or an office supply item …
• Your something will most likely be brand new, though it may also be refurbished or antique …
• Your something may be …

Somethingstore.com

Based on your feedback we’ve updated quite a few sections of Stirrdup today to make things a little easier to read and use.

New tabs, a re-designed comment page that gives us real estate to release some new features we’re working on, prettier avatars, and whole slew of other small tweaks that should add up to a better experience. We still have a boat load of improvements and new features coming and these changes should pave the way for them. Almost every change we made was based on the feedback you guys send us through the contact us link at the bottom of every Stirrdup page, so please keep them coming.

Things we’re currently working on:

1. Photo thumbnails and sorting.
2. Displaying everyone who me too’d a story.
3. A section where you can go back through all the stories you’ve read and the option to display them publicly (turned off by default).
4. Snazzier user profiles and options.
5. Letting you create a list of your personal websites and notifying you when one of your stories is submitted and/or becomes hot.
6. Feedback forums. You guys have a ton of great ideas and we want to give you a place to be able to share them with each other (and motivate us to work faster. :))
7. Tagging. You wouldn’t believe how often we see this one.

We’re also working on some smaller things like letting you me too a story from the main page - or any other story view - without having to visit the comment section. We purposely avoided doing this because we wanted to make sure if you me too’d a story that you had at least cared enough about it to visit the comments, but it turns out you guys pretty much hate that. Since there are enough other factors to offset the “speed me too’ing” in our points system we’re finally going to implement that.

Stay tuned!