From here on, posting all Crusher updates on a Twitter page. It’s a public page, no need to join Twitter to see it. If you also use Twitter, be a pal and come “follow” Crusher. Updates will be infrequent and promises to not be very annoying.

Crusher Twitter Page

Sorry WordPress. Nothing against you. Just that micro-blogging is a better fit.

Just some visual updates to clean up the presentation of photos/photostream and the slideshow window. Also made the “Upload Photos” action more prominent on the page to really encourage your guests to share their pics.

Based on some feedback, I also cleaned up the home page and removed a lot of the clutter that aren’t very important. I’d like to bring back the ASCII logo somehow, but removing it has made the top page much easier to get into.

A user ’s feedback copied below received through our public Satisfaction forum got me really thinking today about the Crusher domain “crush3r.com”. It’s been a concern in the back of my head for a while. Back in graphic design, you can run your page through a black & white fax machine to get a better sense of the level of clarity in the visual design. Today, I yell out a site’s domain across a crowded bar to get a sense of how well people would retain the address in their memory. If you have a hard time having to spell it out, it’s likely not ideal. Take for example “del.icio.us” before they were able to get “delicious.com”. 

But for anyone out there who’s shopped around lately, you know how impossible it is to find something decent without loads of cash to blow. Still, I went looking for something better. Last week, I got lucky and found p0p.com for sale. Sure it was expensive and it has a number. But it’s a great word, graphically iconic, and heck the “O” is right next to the zero. I proposed we rebrand p0pulist along with the new design we’re about to release. That’s to be decided.

This evening I was using Domainr (a site by the nb.io gents) and after dozens of searches and several email inquiries I found one which I though neat – http://robo.to – as in Mister Roboto. Sure it might still require me to elaborate across a crowded bar, “robo dot tee oh as in mister roboto”, but it looks and feels significantly less obscure and less alienating as”crush3r.com”. Could Roboto be the new Crusher? That is also to be decided. Everything is always clearer after sleeping over it.

Crusher: user-feedback and observations

More of a user-feedback than a question. Excellent user interface, concepts, implementation, etc. – head and shoulders above the rest. That said, I think the one thing that may be retarding your explosion-level growth is your current brand accessibility… or inaccessibility as the case may be. 

The “Crush3r” brand has a very narrow band of the general public that will understand the “l33t” reference. Also, the name… my 5-second impression of “Crusher” is of an elitist designer-centric entity. My finace’s impression is of something between a robot-battle-royal and an ASCII-art party.

Again, wonderful product and I’d like to see you guys succeed.

A persistent button now appears at the bottom-right of the site  which pops open a widget for submitting feedback via GetSatisfaction.

Added a Twit This button at the bottom of Crusher event pages which only the organizer can see unless the page is made public. Now you can quickly twit a Crusher event, as well as share it in Facebook or MySpace.

I just created this change and deployed it. So let me know if you have a big event, are reading this, and you think it sucks. Basically, now if you invite more than 100 people and chose to display the guest list on the page, it will appear as a text only list – not the tiled image grid.

Reason is: we’ve had people break their pages by inviting hundreds and hundreds to a large event and choosing to display “all guests invited” on the page. This makes the page really heavy, and with that many guests, difficult to visually parse. A text only list loads the page up much faster and sorts it alphabetically so it’s easier to locate people.

There is probably a better way to program this, like having it snap to the list view ONLY if there are more that 100 to display at the time – rather than now, where the rule is strictly if you send out more than 100 invites to the page. Since I’m not a programmer, that update will have to wait a bit.

Order captcha shirts now and never be caught without a shirt in 2009. I no longer have all sizes available so email me first with the size/gender/quantity information at: info [at] crush3r [dot] com

I just deployed some fixes. I know it’s the middle of the day so I hope it wasn’t too disruptive to anyone using Crusher at the time. It was an important fix. It should have just been a few second glitch. 

1. Smirk now always appears in the event page organizer, event page guest list, and profile page. I am not a trained developer and mistakenly placed the JS call. All working now. Also now promoting video icons on the profile page.

2. Smirk now has a better way of detecting your webcam. If it didn’t work for you before, try it again.

FYI: Smirk is currently being redesigned and a much cooler beta is coming in a few days.

About to deploy a list of new stuff but the most significant is having Smirks appear on the guest list itself. Yeah, not that big of a feature but I think it will look pretty compelling, new. Will wait ’til around 2am PST tonight so that the push doesn’t disturb too many people.

Other updates are mostly small changes to clean up the UI language and design further within the Stuff page, Contacts page, top navigation, Account page, etc.

A couple of updates have been deployed, interface changes based on feedback from Buster, a user who invited over 4,500 people to an event he is organizing. Whew. Not the typical event size we optimize for so only now dealing with issues around large guest lists.

1) The printable guest list page is much cleaner and now only displays positive responses. Before it used to list everyone you invited, which doesn’t make sense. Now you can easily print a list for the door or as a reference for making name tags for attendees.

Update: Now neatly cut/pastes from the printable list page to an Excel document.

2) We’ve had a feature where you can opt-in to making your event be an open guest list, meaning anyone who you send to the page URL will be able to add themselves to the guest list. I made some changes to make this call-to-action a lot clearer since before it was a mere tiny little link.