We’re happy to introduce another cool new feature: The Waterfall.  The Waterfall gives you an easy way to find the newest arguments that have just been posted to CreateDebate, looking across every debate.  We think you’ll find The Waterfall to be a great all-purpose landing page since it serves up all of the newest content on a silver platter.  We have also whipped up a new RSS feed that can deliver The Waterfall directly to your favorite reader.  For more information about the RSS feed you can read this.

Keep sending us your feedback!  What do you think of The Waterfall?

Just rolled out a much needed feature that I hope you’ll all enjoy!  Finally, the voting buttons have a brain.  Throughout the entire site you’ll now be able to see which arguments you’ve already voted on (and how you voted).  Feel free to change your up/down vote for any argument as much as you’d like.  If you’d like to retract your vote, you can do that too.

Thanks for all of your feedback.  In the next couple of weeks we’ll be dropping a bunch of new features that will address many of your comments.  As always, we’re looking to you for your thoughts on how CreateDebate should work, so keep sending us your ideas & suggestions!

One of the basic premises of CreateDebate is that it must be simple to find the debates that interest you. This is why we’ve spent so much time building the main Browse Debates view. We have always let you sort the debates (and your search results) in a number of ways. If you haven’t tried it already, go ahead and play around with the sorting options on the right side menu: you can pivot the debates in many ways. You can also sort within specific categories (sports, entertainment, politics, etc).

Today, we are happy to announce the addition of the New Activity sorting option. This algorithm allows you to see which debates have had new arguments added recently. This sorting option adds a “traditional forum” feeling to CreateDebate because the debates with the newest posts are bumped to the top. Using this sorting option is a great way to discover upcoming debates that were recently created but haven’t yet built the head-of-steam needed to become heated. It is also a great way to a rediscover older debates that have fallen of the Most Heated page but are still getting lots of attention and participation.

What do you think? We always love to hear your feedback!

I just finished reading a great article, written by Albert Wenger at his Continuations blog. Albert is a partner at Union Square Ventures and I’ve found his writings to be concise (always appreciated) and meaningful. Last week, he wrote about the importance and difficulty of listening to your customers. More food-for-thought than advice, the article throws out three questions and some common problems associated with each.

As we continue to build CreateDebate into a business, we have frequently found ourselves addressing these same questions. In the spirit of transparency, I thought I would take a crack at answering Albert’s questions from the current perspectives of the CreateDebate team.

Which customers should we listen to?

This question should probably read: Should we listen to our early-adopters or should we listen to what we believe to be our “mainstream” customers? We are about 1 week into our public beta and, fortunately, we already have a nice stable of committed early-adopters that have found real utility in using CreateDebate. We are thrilled about this and we are committed to rewarding our early-adopters with a feature set that over delivers on their requests. At the same time, however, we must remain fully-focused on building CreateDebate into a highly scalable decision-making tool that is capable of providing significant value to paying customers.

Paying Customers? Don’t worry, we’ll never charge you to use CreateDebate.com. Rather, at some point in the near future, we do expect to charge licensing fees in exchange for private use of the CreateDebate application software. We have already been contacted by several enterprise & governmental organizations interested in deploying our software and we think this business model has a significant amount of promise.

At the end of the day, the answer to this question isn’t as tricky as it seems. First and foremost, we are dedicated to building CreateDebate into a community. To be successful, we must embrace our early adopters and their new feature requests. We always discuss new feature requests as a team and do our best to prioritize and temper those requests against our vision of the “mainstream” customer. In a nutshell, our strategy is to grow our community by continually improving our software. By doing so, it is our hope that the CreateDebate application will become a powerful decision-making software package worth paying for.

How should we listen to our customers?

We get a lot of critical feedback and suggestions via email. At this stage in the game, virtually every email that we receive prompts a personal response. We alway log the comments and do our best to group and prioritize them. The problem with email feedback, though, is that it sometimes proves difficult to accurately deduce exactly what our community really needs, as opposed to what a small, vocal subset of our community thinks that it wants.

In light of this contradiction, our preferred forum for listening to our customers has become the website itself. Last week, one of the most popular debates on CreateDebate focused on the new features that people would like to see incorporated the site. The debate spurred lots of arguments and votes and gave us a much better perspective on the new features that our community needs. As a result, we went to work and delivered a bunch of new features over the weekend, including:

• A new way to sort the arguments within a debate (”Sort By Newest”)
• A better way to catch up on new activity (”New Activity Quick Glance”)
• Permalinks for each argument to facilitate more sharing
• RSS feeds for the Most Heated and Newest debates
• A more secure Address Book

How should we reconcile listening to our customers with our strategy?

Our goal is to build an incredibly useful tool that will help groups of people to sort through issues, viewpoints and opinions so that better decisions can be made. I’ve already noted that our strategy is to grow our community by continually improving our software. This is a strategy that we fully believe in and are committed to following. To that end, we are dedicated to making listening to customers a priority and constant process as opposed to a one off exercise.

As far as the reconciliation process goes, I’m afraid that we haven’t yet fully figured it out. The good news, however, is that we are aware of the importance of the task at hand. I fully expect this year to be full of twists and turns as our community grows and our software becomes more sophisticated. Most of all, I hope that you will stay around to help us grow and let us know what we are doing right (and not-so-right). If you have feedback, please share!

We’ve been thinking about the feature suggestions everyone mentioned in the debate about What features should be added to CreateDebate. Loudacris already let everyone know that we added the date view to debates to view arguments arranged by date as well as the point view. This should make it easier to follow the logical flow of a debate, and to see what arguments might have influenced responses.

The second new feature from the feature requests is RSS feeds of the most recent debates and most heated debates, so you can keep track of the online debates on CreateDebate in your favorite RSS Reader. The About RSS page has the list of feeds we have set up, and more information about how to subscribe to RSS feeds. We’re still working on more of the features mentioned, so stay tuned.

CreateDebate has a new debate format! We just added in challenge debates to our lineup of the standard 2-sided and popularity debates. Now you can challenge your enemies or allies to a debate between just the two of you for a faster paced, more one-on-one competition. Just go to the profile page of the person you want to challenge, and click the “Challenge to a debate” link to get started.

We’re thinking of expanding challenge debates in the future depending on feedback to include some other possibilities, like live debates with a more chat-like feel, wagering your user points in the challenge so the winner takes all, or expanding the challenge format to make it easy to create group debates. Take a look and let us know what you think!

We just finished rolling out 2 sweet new features that we think you’ll like.

The first is the ability to see which other people are currently online. Throughout the site, wherever you see the polaroid thumbnail, the word online will appear if that person is logged in and currently using the site. We are striving to make the site as “real-time” as possible and this feature is another big step in that direction.

The second is the ability to carry on conversations with other people. You can write messages to other people and they can write back to you. All of your messages are stored and displayed on your profile (people can also leave new messages there). If you click Follow this conversation, the back-and-forth messages shared between any 2 people will be displayed. If you leave a message for yourself then it will be added to your Inner Monologue. A little tricky to explain but if you just click around a bit, I think you’ll get the gist.

If you already have an account, click here to see your messages. Let us know what you think!

First of all, I am getting really psyched about launching CreateDebate. From conception to coding, it has taken about a year to get where we are now. We have been in a private beta period now for about 2 weeks and, by all indications, things are looking pretty good. Before we can open up, there is still a number of new features that we are going to implement, including:

• The ability to create 1 vs 1 and private debates
• More advanced debate search with result sorting
• Improve the “Most Heated” algorithm
• Public messaging system with alert notifications
• More robust email notifications

Once those features are in place and we are completely comfortable with our website security situation, it will be go time. I can’t wait until we can open the site up to the world. I know that its going to take some time to build up a community of engaged, passionate people but I’m looking forward to the ride. I’ll know that CreateDebate has made it when McLovins sets up an account. Hopefully that superbad day isn’t too far away.

Until then, thanks for checking out this blog and thanks for checking out the site. I’m looking forward to getting to know many of you and I hope that you’ll enjoy getting to know us.