The good news is that the first stage of the push went very well.  We’ve seen lots of activity with people uploading pictures and creating news articles by the dozen.  We’ve also had a lot of people talking to us about +, which is superb, and in the main the response has been very positive.  Throughout that though, we’ve had a few themes constantly coming up that I’d like to address here.

“I can’t see my fixtures on the dash!”

Chalk this one up to a slight misunderstanding!  This is all down to the Watchlist, a feature which is designed to let you watch just the teams you’re interested in.  Previously this was just powering availability, but in + it’s made its way to the Dashboard.  We hoped that people would be aware of what they were watching and this would be clear; this obviously wasn’t always the case.  You’re all right, it should be much clearer.  Now, on the dashboard, you can see exactly what you’re watching, and go straight to edit it if needs be.

“How do I send a club message? What am I missing?”

At the moment ‘club wide messages’ have been taken out for a freshen-up.  The feature will be returned soon with more power so that you’ll be able to send messages based on tags, allowing you to just push information to certain sections of your club.  In the meantime, you can create a news article and, once published, email the article out to the whole club.

“I want to delete or remove inactive players NOW!”

We know.  A central part of + is that you’ll be able to move people into various sections defined by tags.  Unfortunately, we need to push certain features out first in an attempt to avoid organised chaos.  Believe me, I’d love to see all of + out now.  Good things come to those who wait!

So there we go, the 3 main things heard.  We’ve had lots of other feedback as well, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t appear here.  It’s all going into shaping the rest of +.  That said, we’re not going to get everything right all the time; that’s life.  What’s most important is that we know when we’ve done something wrong, so that we can do something to put it right!  So keep the feedback coming, it’s fantastic to hear!

Considering the size of the response we’ve received to +, we’ve decided to go one step further and introduce live chat.  From now on you’ll see a little blue button in the bottom right hand corner of the browser, which says “Chat with Clubhouse Team”.  Click that and you can start talking to us directly.  Both Pat and I will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. You can still contact us in all of the usual ways: through the support section, by email (support@clubhouseapp.com), by tweet (@clubhouseapp), or by message on our facebook page (http://facebook.com/clubhouseapp).  But if you have a problem and need help right there and then, just jump on live chat.  Or if you’re in the North-West of England, pop round for a cup of tea; the kettle’s always on!

Now that everything we pushed last week is pretty much stable, we’ll be pushing the rest of the + messaging section this week, including Message by tag, as well as starting to push the Profile and Membership sections, whose first item is archiving players.

That’s your round-up ladies and gentlemen.  Anyway I must go, there’s a live chat window flashing at me!

To place that in context, for those who haven’t followed this blog, Clubhouse previously reached a point where it had largely solved the problem of team selection given the approach it took.  This was around late 2009 or so.  It wasn’t entirely clear where the next step lay.  We attempted to build on what we had but ended up with neither a genuine step forward nor a refined version of our original offering.  I discussed this at length in my previous post in late 2010, which was around the time we decided to step back and re-evaluate.

What have we come up with then, I hear you ask?  We simply call it Clubhouse+.  It’s the first stage in the vision we now have for the product, keeping team selection as the keystone of weekly activity while building off that in a meaningful and elegant way.  + solves virtually every problem we’ve had to confront since Clubhouse was deployed in the field, and also tackles the problems a product faces as its lifespan grows.

Clubhouse+ is pretty substantial in its scope so we’ll be rolling it out gradually over the coming weeks, tweaking things as we go to ensure the smooth arrival of the next piece.  Here’s a run down of the order of play:

Images

Pictures will now take centre stage in all aspects of Clubhouse, both functionally, so you can quickly work out who people are, and aesthetically, to bring certain sections to life.  You’ll see player images attached to posts, be able to add club logos, and add galleries to fixtures.  Time to capture that magic moment!

Messaging

Email has always been at the core of communication in Clubhouse, but that tends to presume everything is a threaded conversation, whose only important content is the last reply.  Much of the communication we see in Clubhouse is more of a conversation, so we’ve implemented an entirely new news section to replace message of the day.  This will allow the club to make announcements, celebrate milestones and send out fixture information, such as rearrangements or results, in a place that everybody sees as they visit Clubhouse to update their availability.  The club members can then discuss and vote, if necessary, on all these articles over time.  The news will support full moderation, markdown (so you can style your articles and comments), generate an RSS feed and be directly replyable to via email.

To contrast with the news section we’ll be greatly improving messaging, so when you do need to send an email it’ll be just as you need it.  It’ll now be powered by tags, so you can send an email to any defined subsection of the club.  It won’t be a separate feature anymore, it’ll be inline when you need it.

Profile

The hallmark of Clubhouse+ will be the level of configurability of what it does for you.  This is now reflected in a profile for each perspective on that.  You will have your own profile where you can configure your details, picture, medical information, password and contact preferences.  Alongside that you’ll have a membership preferences section (for each club you’re in) which will define the relationship between you and and that club.  Sections in here will include your watchlist, notifications, and privacy.  These settings will be able to override or augment your user profile.  Lastly, there will be a club profile, which will include sections such as logo, public information, address, owner, notifications and privacy.  This will, for example, allow local people to find and request to join your club on Clubhouse (if you wish to be publicly listed that is).

Membership

In more idyllic days we wished to spread the load of work across the club.  However, while that worked well for some it clearly didn’t work for others.  The main focus of Clubhouse+ is on being a power tool for those who do put all the effort in.  You’ll be able to add and manipulate people who have never even logged in.  That means updating their availibility, selecting them, tagging them, basically anything you can do to yourself.  They’ll even get selection messages, whether that be via email, Twitter, or Facebook and can reply to them saying they can play.  All of this will allow the core members to get on with the weekly running of the club without being held up by anyone.  If those people do login, or even only reply to mails, then that’s a bonus.  Clubhouse+ will work for every situation and encourage the spreading of load, rather than forcing it.

Many people come and go from clubs over the years, whether that be leaving for different clubs, or taking time to raise a family; equally, juniors grow up!  A combination of bulk tagging and the new profile settings will allow people to modify their relationship with the club, and the club with the player as it evolves.  The player will be able to configure how up-to-date they wish to be kept, and the club will be able to archive or delete players to focus on the people they need at that moment in time, for example to fulfil fixtures, or for fundraising.

The web has come a long way since Clubhouse was originally launched in 2008.  To reflect that, + will integrate with Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to authenticate yourself with either of those accounts.  Put simply, if you’re logged in with Facebook you’ll also be logged in with Clubhouse.  We’ll also do some really useful stuff, like automatically updating your image in Clubhouse as it’s updated on Facebook, and if you wish we’ll post your selections to your Facebook wall or Twitter Feed too.

Administration

Team selection is the foundation on which everything else runs, so to reflect that we’re going to add an entirely new tasks section.  You’ll be able to create lists and assign tasks to people, effectively managing everything from one place.  This process will include elements of every improvement I’ve described so far, so is fairly complex to talk about in advance; I’ll discuss this in much more detail as it’s pushed.

Selection

As you may have noticed, each section has built on the last.  This final section is certainly no exception!  There is far too much for me to go into it all now, so I’ll just list the major themes we’ll be introducing. You’ll be able to reject a selection and edit a team, rearrange published fixtures, as well as adding results to fixtures.

So, there you go.

There are lots of improvements we’ll be adding that I haven’t gone into here, because they’re not necessarily “features”.  Many things will hopefully go unnoticed, while others will seem as if they have always been done like that; fingers crossed anyway!  It’s all about bringing Clubhouse, across the board, up to a standard you would simply expect.  Everything should be intuitive, work for you when you need it and get out of the way when you don’t.

We’re going to be pushing most of the images, and a fair bit of the messaging improvements today.  Hold on to your hats!  The rest will come week by week and I’ll tweet about it as it happens.  That’ll be a plus!

I’ve never really noticed Clubhouse’s age before mainly because things have been moving at such a pace any milestones had have a cursory thought at best, however as some of you may have noticed I have been conspicous by my absence both on this blog and twitter for a large part of 2010. For those concerned individuals I can assure you both Clubhouse and its team are in rude health, we have 100s of active clubs and continue to develop the tools required to take Clubhouse to where we want it to be. However for the time being we have taken a step back for a number of reasons.

With the advent of our last major update we had essentially solved the problem of team selection given the angle at which we had approached it. That is to say a browser orientated closed application for players of large clubs fielding several teams weekly, managed through email notifications. Most of the problems within this domain were solved with elegant solutions. However our entire roadmap had largely been refinements of the ideas we initially had on the problem of team selection, the next step was not so clear. It became increasingly obvious as Clubhouse grew that team selection formed the keystone of a clubs weekly activities, and as such so many other facets of club life spawned out of and were managed through the processes inherent to team selection, and therefore potentially inherent to Clubhouse, fundraising, events, finance, membership, and news, to name but a few. Each club had their own priorities and friction points and a whole range of requests were made. Unfortunately in potentially going forward and solving any of these problems we were faced with additional complex challenges team selection on its own didn’t present, for example inter section communication, so, instead of Brooklands Cricket Club, you would be a member of Brooklands Sports Club, with the hockey, cricket, lacrosse, and tennis sections all being managed through one club while retaining their autonomy in the certain areas. Equally as Clubhouse aged, we were facing challenges, intrinsic to team selection, that Clubhouse was not initially designed for, archiving of players being the major example. With any of these directions are entire angle was in question, we would need much greater accessibility, it would no longer be just about players and captains, we would have parents, chairmen, and fundraising committees to think of. We would need an open application to allow anyone affiliated with the club to see what was happening, available in as many forms as possible. All in all, whichever path we chose it was going to mean major architectural changes on every level. At first we tried to work within the confines of our initial design and user interface but over time this became limiting. Despite completing large parts of our next update by March we had neither one thing nor the other, neither the original simple flexible solution nor a genuine step forward. We were trying to push features into a user interface which simply didn’t fit. Ultimately I decided we needed to take a step back, many pieces of software start off brilliantly and ultimately are ruined over time, I had no wish to see this happen to Clubhouse.

Around the time we were grappling with this update QMTech, the team behind Clubhouse, had the opportunity to take on a enterprise software project (largely because of Clubhouses success), building an event registration system which we initially sold to Mercedes Benz. This product, called Marquee, has been a major success, but given the calibre and size of our clients it has taken all of our resources and then some. Clubhouse is currently a free project supported by QMTech, as such until Clubhouse grows to a point where it can become self sustaining it relies on the benevolence of QMTech. Ultimately Marquee is good news for Clubhouse as it allows us to further our R&D into the area that Clubhouse lies, in the short term, however, it has squeezed the time we can spend on Clubhouse, and hastened my decision to step back temporarily to re-evaluate.

Fundamentally we have a service which solves, in the main, the problem of team selection for a lot of clubs, we’ve left this in place for now while continuing to support, maintain and use it ourselves. We do have major aspirations for Clubhouse though, and we’ll be back, most likely in 2011, with something new. I’ll try not to leave it this long before blogging again!