Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience! You can follow us at @UserVoice for updates.

[UPDATE - 2:38 PST]

We had to take down our site for about 10 minutes to perform some emergency maintenance. Everything is back up and running now, but we will continue to closely monitor the database in case any issues arise. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on Twitter or at support [at] uservoice.com.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Quick installation of UserVoice
• Automatic Single Sign On through Google’s universal navigation
• Centralized administration

The new integration now allows Google Apps customers to quickly implement UserVoice for their sites. Previously, admins had to set up Single Sign On through programing a short line of JavaScript. Now, simply by signing up through Google Apps, UserVoice’s Single Sign On is already implemented for your domain.

This is just the beginning of our integration with more to come, but we are happy to announce our latest features.

Check out our press release here:

San Francisco, CA – March 9, 2010 — UserVoice today announced its availability through the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. UserVoice’s integration with Google Apps makes it the most convenient way to give UserVoice ideas easy traction within Google Apps. UserVoice is a feature-rich web application that allows users to manage their data from anywhere in the world with just a browser and an internet connection. With UserVoice, companies can collect feedback from anywhere and aggregate ideas into actionable items for product or organizational development.

“UserVoice was designed to reduce the barriers associated with collecting feedback, so integrating with Google Apps was a logical choice for us,” says Rich White, company CEO. “By adding UserVoice to the Google Apps Marketplace, we’ve streamlined the feedback and decision-making process for organizations.”

“We are very excited to have UserVoice in the Google Apps Marketplace,” adds Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise. “Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like UserVoice are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps, allowing IT administrators to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and extend Google Apps to meet more of their business needs. We are happy to offer UserVoice to the millions of Google Apps users who have embraced the cloud.”

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

ABOUT USERVOICE
Tracking over 7 million votes on 400,000 ideas for nearly 35,000 organizations, San Francisco- based UserVoice is the leading web application for involving customers, clients, and constituents in decision-making. UserVoice communities are the leading method of turning customer feedback into an actionable list. The new integration into Google Apps allows organizations to implement a simple feedback system into any Google Site. To learn more about the integration visit the Google Apps Marketplace™.

####

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

Today we are excited to announce the impending release of our new Admin Console! This has been a labor of love over the last several months, and we want to thank our users who have provided invaluable feedback – much of which has been included in this release.

Starting today, when you log into the existing admin console, you will see a link allowing you to test-drive the new interface and features. In the coming weeks, once we’ve completed some migrations, we will roll everyone over to the new console and retire the old one.

So what’s new in this release? Glad you asked.

Complete redesign

The new Admin Console has been completely redesigned to help you manage your feedback site quickly and efficiently. Previously, admins had to switch between their end-user feedback site and admin console to view and manage their users’ ideas. Now, you can perform all administrative tasks within the Admin Console, quickly filter and sort ideas, dig deeper to find all related comments and supporters, as well as learn more about your users’ activity.

Dashboard

The new dashboard gives you a bird’s-eye-view of the ideas and activity on your feedback site, as well as see which ideas need your attention most.

During our testing phase, all accounts will be able to preview these analytics. Once we roll out the new admin console to everyone, they will be available on various paid plans.

Merge duplicate ideas

(See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/1KpGN)

This feature allows you to merge duplicate ideas in your forum. When an idea is merged into another, its votes and supporters are added and the “winning” idea.

Merging is available on all of our paid plans.

Categories

(See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/bayiW)

Forums are a great way to organize ideas across different products, but oftentimes ideas within a single forum could be categorized even further. Now, a category can be assigned to an idea (either by the person creating the idea or an administrator). Admins can also create a custom set of categories for each forum.

Categories are available on all of our paid plans.

Moderation tools

While we currently allow users to flag inappropriate content, this isn’t always enough. We’ve enhanced our moderation tools to include pre-moderation, advanced user flagging actions, filters, and granular voter fraud detection.

Spam filter 

(See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/jf8G6)

We’ve integrated Automattic’s popular Akismet spam filter to remove idea and comment spam.

The spam filter is available on our Bronze plan and above.

Pre-moderation (See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/hCubI)

Many of our customers require an extra-level of human-powered moderation. Our pre-moderation tool allows moderators to approve new ideas and comments before they are published.

Pre-moderation is available on our Silver plan and above.

Profanity filter (See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/iVjyC)

Our profanity filter allows you to filter out inappropriate content posted in your forum. Initially, this feature is English-only, but we will be rolling this out for other languages soon.

The profanity filter is available on our Silver plan and above.

Voter fraud detection (See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/3u4W7)

We’ve had a vote fraud detection system in place for quite some time, but have found that different organizations require different levels of prevention. We now give you greater control over how the system detects and discards fraudulent votes.

Voter fraud detection is available on all of our plans. Advanced settings are available on our Silver plan and above.

Notes & File attachments (admins only)

(See idea: http://uservoice.com/a/fQuZ2)

Admins can now attach files directly to an idea for everyone to see, or privately as a note to other admins. Notes and attachments are a great way to continue the dialog around ideas.

File attachments are available on our Bronze plan and above.

And much, much more…

More custom color options, branded emails, traffic analysis, email analytics, idea history view, message center, private idea supporter messages, site-wide search… the list goes on! If you’re already an admin, log in to test it out today.

And, as always, we appreciate your feedback!

– Joshua Rudd, Head of User Experience

If you have any concerns please contact support AT uservoice.com.

Simply put that means if you’re not a website with more than 10M pageviews a month, then you have unlimited usage. If you are, we want to talk to you about your goals so we can provide excellent service for your account.

What does that mean for accounts moving forward?

Go out there and start listening to your users! We hope these changes enable all UserVoice customers to get as much usage out of the service without worry, while ensuring that we can provide a high level of service to all customers.

- Rich

Through the Online Public Engagement Grant Program, at least five (5) grantees will be awarded free use of the UserVoice platform plus implementation training – an up to $10,000.00 value. Applications will be received on a “rolling basis” with “Phase I” of the grant period concluding on March 8, 2010. New grant phases may be opened as availability permits.

We have been about engagement since the day we first designed this product, and we’re happy to have a partner like Common Sense California to help put the product in the hands of public sector leaders who can really use it to engage their residents in making important local decisions.

To learn how to apply check out the CSC UserVoice application.

- Daniel

Sorry for the inconvenience,

Team UserVoice

Where?
ZURB HQ
55 N. 3rd Street, Suite 100a
Campbell, CA 95008

When?
Friday, December 4th, 2009
from 12:00-1:30pm PST
Check out what I will be speaking about:

• A framework for quickly testing business ideas and failing fast
• The power of widgets to drive brand awareness
• How to turn your customers into your best distribution channel
• Why sometimes it’s helpful to make features harder to use
• How “connect and close” can be a better fundraising strategy than “divide and conquer”

Hope to see you all out there, and don’t forget to RSVP!

-Rich

No, no it’s not like that *that*. It’s that I’ve finally managed to get out of the office and to be honest… it’s a bit lonely. To remedy that I’ve hatched a plan to combine two of my favorite things: you, our customers (big and small; old, new and future), and free beer (I’ll have a Hefeweizen please).

Here are the stops I’m making on this current tour:

NYC
Where: Cornerstone Tavern
961 2nd Ave
(between 50th St & 51st St)
New York, NY 10022
(212) 888-7403
When: Tomorrow! Friday November 20.
Time: 6 PM
RSVP

London
Where: Bar TBD
Date: Sunday November 22.
Time: 19:00
RSVP

Oslo
Where: Bar TBD
Date: Thursday November 26.
Time: 19:00
RSVP

If you can’t make it to the pub, drop me message me on Twitter (@rrwhite) and maybe we can find another time to meet up.

Don’t see your city here? How about you add it to our newly minted Bar Tour Forum and we’ll hope to see you out there,

Rich(ard) White

More information regarding the problem is available here: http://engineyard.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/ey04-io-bandwidth-issue/.

I want to apologize for our down time but more so I want to make sure we’re learning from this experience and improving the service. More on that in a bit.

UPDATE: We’re working on some improvements to the feedback tab widget that will ensure that our service interruptions don’t affect your page loads. We hope to have these improvements out later on today but they will require you to change your embed code. You can vote for this issue here (http://uservoice.com/a/vHVF6) and you’ll be updated when it goes out (we’ll also blog/tweet about it as well when it’s ready).

Thanks for your patience,

Richard White, CEO

Full details of this issue are available in the email below which we received from EngineYard.

We apologize for any inconvenience. Further information will be available here: http://engineyard.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your understanding,

The UserVoice Team

Date: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:16 PM
Subject: Emergency Shelf Replacement

There will be emergency maintenance scheduled tomorrrow Friday Oct 30th at 11:00PM PDT. Our monitoring alerted us of a failed drive in one of the disk raidsets on the shelf. The shelf has an older backplane version that may cause a cascading array failure if we swap out the drive and rebuild the degraded raid array. To reduce the risk of data loss on this system the shelf must be swapped tonight and the affected raidsets parity rebuilt.

During the raidset rebuild which will be a few hours, I/O performance may be affected. During the swap, slices on the shelf will have their IO frozen and automatically resumed once the swap is complete. The frozen IO (outage) should last 15-30 minutes but we will set a maintenance window of 1 hour.

Regards,
Cluster Engineering

Help us congratulate Peter, who represented the City of Santa Cruz at Gov 2.0 today and won the opportunity to present again tomorrow at the Gov 2.0 Summit!

If you didin’t already know, the City of Santa Cruz is solving its budget crisis by asking its citizens for help. Using a UserVoice forum and opening up the books, they have developed a plan and are on their way to getting out of the red. All of this was made possible by the community with the people suggesting and vetting ideas.

The City of Santa Cruz is also entered in the Forrester Groundswell award for impacting society for the better. Vote for them by clicking on their stars at the bottom of the page here: http://bit.ly/gkEd7.

We want to thank everyone who has sent us suggestions and comments for their ongoing contribution to improving our service.

In July we started on a revamp of the admin interface and have added some exciting new features. The most prominent of these are:

Admin

added:

• You will now be able to block users under the tab “users”
• Easy access to widget documentation under the tab “widget” (view)
• Easy access to API under the tab “API” (view)
• You can now Export to Excel admin data (view)
• Add your own “internal comments” on suggestions – not visible to users (view)

fixed:

• default forum set up – long list went off screen
• comment/internal comment count was broken
• link to customized SSO login page  goes to your customized login page
• “internal comment” delete button is working again
• admin couldn’t add suggestion with 0 votes when he ran out of votes – works fine again
• billing info displayed wrong “next payment” dat – shows now the correct payment date
• set default forum tab on “new” – works fine now (view)
• create forum that was already created and deleted – works fine now
• delete forum button – works fine now
• xls files are no longer triggered when clicking on “tabs”

End-User

added

improved search (minimum word length, blacklist)

Translation

improved German, Spanish and French translation

I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with these young entrepreneurs to discuss the value of knowing your customers and explaining how they could use UserVoice to do market research.

*Here’s where you come in. They need your feedback.*

There are 4 sponsoring companies that have provided a problem for the campers and there are 2 teams attacking each problem. Each team has brainstormed some solutions to the sponsor provide problems and setup a forum to collect your ideas (and see if you like theirs). Now they need your input.

If your birthday year is odd please leave feedback for group A:

seriousmaterials.uservoice.com
harateam1.uservoice.com
valenceenergy1.uservoice.com
frs1.uservoice.com

If your birthday year is even please leave feedback for group B:

kevinjobs.uservoice.com
harateam2.uservoice.com
valenceenergy2.uservoice.com
frsteam2.uservoice.com

On behalf of all of the campers, thanks for your help!

Daniel here, just checking in from Hollywood. For those of you who don’t know me, I just graduated from Claremont McKenna College and joined UserVoice a couple weeks ago. It’s really good to be a part of the team (take that economy) and we are going to take it to a whole new level. But enough about me, on to something more exciting…

UserVoice just touched down at LAX and is getting ready for a big day tomorrow at Twiistup 6, where Rich will be speaking. After the trek down to SoCal and a nice ride to the Universal Hilton, we are ready to hit up Twiistup. Being back in LA is excellent and an 80 degree weather break from San Francisco is exactly what the doctor ordered (yes, I am used to the heat, having gone to school in Claremont).

This conference is going to be awesome, with 12 companies showcased, us included, and discussion topics with a lot of relevance to young entrepreneurs. With so many cool companies down here, we are looking forward to getting to meet the next generation of promising startups.

If you are going to be there, come find us! We will be setting up a table and Rich will be the one in orange. Also, shout out to Francisco and Jeremiah for setting this up. It’s gonna be great.

- Daniel

There’s certainly some truth to that, but I believe it’s more aptly described as a relay race, an especially grueling relay race where the course itself changes dramatically with each hand off of the baton. Each leg brings new obstacles, and demands that the runners develop skills they didn’t even know existed.

It’s with that in mind that I sit down to write a farewell note to my friend, co-founder and eternal optimist Marcus Nelson as he leaves the UserVoice team to pursue his next dream.

How did we get here?

When we started in late 2007 it was just me & Lance Ivy doing the prototypical designer-developer tag team. A few months later we had a prototype, a little seed money and a concern. I’ve known the pain of building things in the dark and I’m fond of saying “2 people is a project, 3’s (a) company.” I knew we needed someone who could come in and spend his cycles spreading the gospel of UserVoice.

Through local tech events, like SuperHappyDevHouse, I came to meet Marcus and through a certain Craigslist post I found him yet again. He seemed to be the missing ingredient, but like all good engineer types Lance and I thought we needed a test. SXSW was right around the corner, just the test we were looking for. I don’t know what we expected, but it was certainly exceeded. I think I saw Marcus for all of 2 hours over 3 days and each time it was an exasperated Marcus saying “I just met so-and-so… oh and do you have any more cards.” Hurricane Marcus was bearing down on SXSW. He was a force of nature. In the end he gave out every one of his cards and half of mine.

That’s Marcus for you. Put him in a room of smart people and he’s like the Googlebot spidering his way from person to person, bringing back the raw social capital a fledgling startup needs to get noticed.

You might have met Marcus on Twitter

I remember when Marcus introduced me to “the Twitter.” Or at least I remember my reaction. “You’re talking to individual people… like one by one… that’ll never scale. What we need is to talk to bloggers!”. I had some past success with guerrilla blog marketing and naturally that was *the* way to get noticed. Not this stupid big-ass, confusing chat room called Twitter.

Marcus didn’t listen to me and I’m very thankful for that. You *can*… no you *have* to build awareness of your product one person at a time. And it does scale… well at least when you have a b2b model like ours. [psst, tools like UserVoice help scale that 1:1 feeling of connectedness ]. The *individual* relationships that were cultivated over Twitter led to cornerstone customers, future employees, positive press and even investment.

Back to the present

I’ve learned a lot from Marcus over the past 18 months. I’ll never work a room like he does, be quite as optimistic or crack as corny jokes (I’m probably okay with that bit) but I’ve certainly learned a lot about the value of relationships and positive thinking.

Marcus will certainly be missed. But like a runner in the relay, has has cleanly handed off the baton to a new team of great people that have come on board to run this leg. We’ve an exciting new sales team featuring Daniel Kan (you’ll see his bright smiling face on the sign-up page), I’ve turned the designery keys over to the excellent Joshua Rudd and I’ll be stepping into marketing & evangelism. There’s a lot of excitement on the team and on the horizon.

Marcus is off to to new opportunities and places that stretch him to the limit, yet again. As a co-worker and even more so as a friend I hope you’ll join me in wishing him the best.

You can reach Marcus on Twitter (@marcusnelson) and via email (marcusnelson@yahoo.com)

It always feels so good to hear from excited customers! =) We LOVE listening to our users, and have been busy working on new features and improvements to make it easier for you to listen and respond to yours!

Below are many of changes we made in June based on your feedback :

Translations

• Added: Japanese & Chinese Translations (read about our trip to Japan)
• Improved: French Translation
• Improved: Nederlands Translation
• Improved: German translation

API

• Fixed: Suggestions api call
• Fixed: API returns both SSO display name and guid
• Fixed: XML fields return guid when appropriate

Admins

• Added: Admins now receive email notifications for new suggestions. These can be turned on/off in your profile settings (view)
• Added: Admins can now set the default translation on a per-forum basis
• Added: Search/filtering in suggestion view for admins
• Added: Admins can now define the default feedback sort (popular, hot, new, accepted, declined) for each forum (view)
• Improved: The interface for managing admins–including the ability to search through existing admins, add new ones, or promote to account owner (view)
• Improved: Interface notification after adding admin
• Improved: The users table now displays all SSO and active users
• Improved: more info links on http://[account].uservoice.com/upgrade

SSO

• Improved: ‘Account owner’ parameter added to SSO
• Improved: Added ‘logout’ feature for SSO users
• Fixed: bug related to associating SSO accounts to 3rd party accounts

Notifications

• Added: Status emails now include avatars beside comments
• Improved: More informative notifications when deleting an account
• Improved: Interface notification for posted comment
• Improved: Links in live-update emails
• Improved: Interface notification for posted comment

End-User

• Added: Forgot password link for users who signed in using 3rd party, now returns specific 3rd party service in error message
• Fixed: bug resulting in 404s on password reset link
• Fixed: bug when attempting to login using a non-existent account
• Fixed: widget display bug in Chrome
• Fixed: bug related to atom feeds

Geeks On A Plane leverages the combined cross border networks of Dave McClure, Founders Fund and Web2Asia to offer attendees an opportunity to accelerate the process of meeting and connecting with key contacts in Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai’s tech and investment sector.

On this trip, UserVoice we’re meeting a slew of entrepreneurs and various start-ups to find out how we can better help companies with their Japanese and Chinese customers.  To demonstrate our sincere interest in moving into the Asian market, we launched a Japanese translation of UserVoice today!  We’ll be active to seek out opportunities to partner with local companies for a localized user experience on UV.

If you’d like to follow the action, please feel free to watch our activity on Twitter or the FaceBook fan page.

UPDATE: We have received a few comments, twitters, and emails from people who were not very happy about the sudden increase in email caused by this new feature. Our goal was to improve communication and help people feel more connected to any progress on their feedback. But, we definitely understand how multiple emails in one day can feel like a bit much. After digging in a little deeper, we discovered that live-updates from user comments are generating the most additional emails, and are most likely to be undesired as live-updates for some users. Specifically, there are twice as many comments as status updates, and four times as many comments as admin responses.

We really appreciate the feedback, and have adjusted the feature in response. Now, there are two separate settings for live-updates: comments (which are now off by default), and status changes and admin responses (which are on by default). As before, these settings can be changed anytime from your settings or from the emails themselves.

(NOTE: Links in previous emails no longer work.)

If you’d like to adjust your notification settings, here’s how to access your preferences:

• Login to uservoice.
• Click on “Settings” beside your Account Name.
• Toggle the checkbox for “receive live status changes, admin responses?”
• Toggle the checkbox for “receive comment updates?”
  

You can also update these settings from the bottom of every email:

Have suggestions about how we can improve our communication? We’d love to hear from you.

There’s a whole bunch of blogging going on out there, so there’s probably not much we can write that hasn’t already been written elsewhere.

So, the only thing left to say is…

Thank you.

Team UserVoice

10:57 Update – Thanks for all the excitement today!

• Original Press Release
  
• TechCrunch
• The Deal
• ZDNetAsia
• ZDNet
  
• Betaworks
• VentureBeat
• FastCompany
• Yahoo Finance
  
• Marketwire – Xing release highlighting UV
• Yahoo Finance — Xing release highlighting UV
• Sys-Con
• Francine Hardaway
• Techmeme
• Wall Street Journal – added may 19th, 2009
• Mixergy – added may 19th, 2009

The findings were surprisingly weighted toward logins using Google as their preferred ID.

That’s why today’s blog post on Google Code Updates is really a wonderful addition to our offering at UserVoice. Google has implemented a brand new OpenID API to make it even easier for services to accept Google User IDs — best thing about this news is that they chose to feature UserVoice for their example!

What this does is makes your UserVoice experiece way more seamless in that users no longer have to leave the page to authenticate their accounts. In additioon, emails can be passed along so our Google users can be kept in the loop for the status of the ideas they’ve participate. This is a huge bonus for brands wanting to keep in touch with customers and truly engage these users and efficiently “close the feedback loop.”

Go check out the article on Google’s website — there’s much more info there, but thank you so much to JanRain for featuring us on their blog as well!!!

Heading to annother continent, we’re very pleased to announce we’ve made our foray into South America by rolling a Barazilian Portuguese translation.  This completes this suggestion, so I’ll go ahead and retire this idea.  Thank you for helping us out!

Now… Which Continent should we go to next?

Going forward, we will now be 20% more capable thanks to our newest team member, Thomas Knoll (pronounced kuh-nall). He’ll be taking on the role of Chief Community Officer.  Some of you will know “TK” for his work at Seesmic.

We think he’s an above-average, super-swell guy having lived the last 10 years in Minnesota, and then Texas before that — so with that kind of background, you know he’s got to be good people!

What we like most about Thomas is his attention to customer details.  He sincerely looks for ways to find out what a customer needs, and then he advocates for their cause — whether it be for a feature update or a UI change.  He aspires to make the customer experience perfect.  And that’s really what you guys deserve.

He’s also a bit of an engineer.  So he’ll be holding customer hands throughout the installation process to insure they have the most satisfying results possible with their new feedback forums. That’s a change that we know will make a huge difference!

He’s also working to provide a number of enhancements so that updates at UserVoice are much more visible.  For instance, he’s already set up a status page to help UV Admins view changes to our releases as soon as they post – better go grab the RSS feed now!

So without gushing any further….  Here’s Thomas:

I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to get to know you and the rest of the UserVoice ecosystem.  Ever since the first time I laid eyes on that little red feedback tab, I have been a fan.  And, now, I see it everywhere!  Which means there are a ton of you out there using and implementing the service.  Obviously, UserVoice believes it’s a pretty good idea for companies/organizations to listen to their communities.  That’s why I am honored to join the UserVoice family as CCO.

Yes, CCO. That officially stands for Chief Community Officer but if you ask @kevinmarks he will tell you it should stand for Chief Conversation Officer (or Tummler, or Geisha, or Animateur).  Others go by Community Evangelist or Community Manager.  At the core of all of these is a recognition that companies and organizations need to join the conversation about their brand and be a hospitable presence in that community.  I guess that makes me the host of the hosts?  Or the listener to the listeners?  Whatever it makes me, I’m here for you, and will do everything I can to improve your ability to turn your customers into champions!

But… enough about me.  I really want to get to know you better.  Would you be willing to share below what most excites you about customer engagement?  Or, maybe what is most frightening about opening your doors to public feedback?

If you think you’d like to get to know Thomas a little more, check out this video he made with Whit Scott — They won a Ford Fiesta for six months as part of the Fiesta Movement Campaign.
.

Welcome to the team Thomas!!!

Today is April 17th. A year ago, at noon o’ clock – UserVoice opened it’s doors to the world. I remember sitting at my desk in Wausau, Wisconsin thinking, “Wow! We’re really doing it!”

Five companies signed up the first day.

Not exactly the big bang of growth we had hoped, but at least we had stopped talking about the idea, and now we were actually making it happen.

Earlier, we had set up a UserVoice page internally for ourselves and a couple other projects. For us it was working, but we wondered if anyone else would care as much. In the end, this proved to be hugely invaluable as users told us what was most important to them. Rather than build what we thought they wanted, we built what we knew they needed.

This of course was what UserVoice was built for, so we discovered very quickly what worked and what was junk. So, we tweaked and adjusted as we grew to streamline the service.

We Built It, Now What?

The next step was promotion – being an early Twitter person, this was my natural inclination. Considering we had very little money, the cost was perfect – FREE! Twitter served as a fantastic marketing tool that helped us generate new leads and make a name for ourselves. Suddenly writers were doing stories on us and things began spiking on up to early Summer.

Here we were, getting calls from major brands & agencies! They wanted features we didn’t have and APIs we didn’t yet provide. The thing was… we were out of money. We all started hustling design jobs or contracting – but we kept at it. Some days were much harder than others.

We were afraid that the initial interest in our project was a false positive — it seemed to be taking forever for big companies to make decisions. Could we create revenue faster by simply making smaller, more departmental sales?

None of us were sleeping well, and stress does pretty weird things with your frame of mind – a little touch and go there for awhile.

Making A Decision

And that’s when something amazing happened. A muggy July evening, Rich and I had a long phone conversation. We talked about what we wanted to happen – how neither of us were happy trying to make it work. We wanted to MAKE it work. We decided.

We quit the side work the very next day and just focused.

Soon after we secured a couple of paid pilots. Family members chipped in. Money trickled in. It wasn’t much, but we were happy and watched things blossom accordingly.

Live, Work, Repeat

We needed to cut our costs, so in September we moved to Santa Cruz, where we found a vibrant new tech community beginning to flourish. If we needed to, we could still get to the City (San Francisco), but housing was considerably cheaper and the quality of life was wonderful. We found a small bungalow with a guest house in the back (occupied), so Emily and I rented the main house with our two kids (we’re married), while Rich slept on the couch.

By October, the economy was sliding. Rich moving out was becoming less likely. In December, the guest house out back opened up and we added a new team member, Scott Rutherford. Together they moved into the guest house where our dog, Rocky now likes to check in from time to time for a good scratch. We were still, and still are, all living on the same plot of land!

By shacking up together, sharing home-cooked meals, and eventually getting office space donated at the local coworking space, NextSpace, we were able to keep our initial costs down, streamline our efforts, and be amazingly efficient.

When you work AND live with your co-workers, there is no “9-5.” It’s 24-7. Our home became the UserVoice “compound,” which is one of the reasons we think made this work. We supported and encouraged each other to keep going. When one was down, the rest worked to pick the other up. This proved vital to our early days as a pre-revenue start up.

One Year Later

So all of that under our belt, we now have 13,683 organizations using our feedback service including Fortune 500 companies, startups, non-profits, education organizations, politicians, open source companies, rock bands and financial institutions! What a difference a year makes!

Anyway, we’re very pleased to have had the opportunity to share this last year with you. In the coming weeks we’ll be announcing a slew of new features, as well as a super improved widget – so be on the look out. What we’ve done so far merely a twinkle of what’s ahead!

More than that, we want to say thank you — so, for the next 48 hours, please be our guest and take 60% off your choice of Bronze, Silver or Gold for the next year.

Simply use the coupon code: oneyearolder

That’s it – again thank you. Have a great weekend!

P.S. — Looks like BusinessWeek took notice of us too – see BEDROOM STARTUPS

Seeking a kick-ass designer to create an amazing user experience for our customers and their users. It will be your responsibility to make user feedback an enjoyable process, designing and supporting some of the largest most recognizable brands in the world – and some that aren’t so much! We need sexy and usable user interfaces, copy that sings and workflows that are to die for.

You have to be completely comfortable with:

• Rapid development / prototyping of new features working directly in XHTML/CSS/JS.
• Working self-sufficiently with Ruby on Rails views / helpers, building templates.
• Debugging cross-browser compatibility issues in no time flat.
• Javascript, both standard libraries (Prototype, jQuery, YUI) as well as an ability to write “naked” JS.
• FireBug for debugging.
• Writing concise copy that users understand.

Bonus points for:

• Obsessive compulsive tendencies to details.
• Experience building embeddable widgets.
• Experience doing A/B testing and funnel analysis (especially on sites with volume).
• Start-up -or- Enterprise support experience.
• Contributions to open source projects.
• Familiarity with Git and GitHub.
• Maintain a blog or twitter account.
• Enjoying the company of a medium-sized canine.

See all available positions here

Since launching UserVoice last year (April 17th), we’ve intentionally aimed our service at appealing to business owners.  We feel that by empowering companies first, users will then have an active and listening ear from a company that is willing and ready to make changes based on their feedback.

Yesterday, Yelp further validated our belief that company involvement is vital, when they opened up their customer review site to business owners, giving them more control with responding to consumer reviews. NYT Link – AP Link

From the NY Times article:

“As the site matures, though, it has been doing more and more to appease small-business owners.”

Our experience has been that companies need and are actively looking for safe places to assist their brand.  If a site can empower & protect the company’s reputation, then it’s going to increase customer support and encourage sales.

With Yelp’s move toward small business and recent changes at GetSatisfaction, this begins to look like a trend, as tactics shift towards involving businesses.  In reality, they should have been doing this all along.  Companies need to feel secure when someone else is representing their brand.  If you’re building a website and having to cater to customers of these brands, remember to keep their interests first. The rest will follow.

That in mind, there are a number of Web 2.0 products that join Get Satisfaction in facilitating people-powered services, such as SuggestionBox and Yelp.  Any person can go to these pages and initiate discussion regardless of whether or not the company is involved. While empowering the user is an amazing proposition, it does not create a safe brand experience (as the 37Signals debacle clearly illustrates).

Different Than Get Satisfaction

We provide a Company-focused strategy, always have.  When you visit a branded UserVoice forum, you can be assured that your feedback is going directly to a company or organization.

In our opinion, helping companies engage and build relationships with their customers is a much stronger value proposition for both parties involved.  If you the user are going to take time out of your day to post feedback, there should be confidence that the company is indeed listening and able to respond.

For a company, they should feel that a third party destination is a safe-place for their customer interactions.  So we offer seamless integration, single sign on (SSO), and fully branded pages that reside on your domain.

Custom Branding Examples

UserVoice does not serve to eliminate offsite dialogue entirely, but steps out of the way to give your company a place to point these discussions toward.

Which is entirely the point — building long-lasting relationships between companies and their customers.

Perhaps in this way we are similar to Get Satisfaction in destination, however, we believe a Company-driven initiative provides a better overall Customer Service experience.

Better because the company is actually listening.

In the next few days we’ll be unpacking more of the Customer vs. Company-focused debate.  Please stay tuned.

The University of Wisconsin is taking a proactive approach – rather than simply raising tuition, they are removing any additional fees to students who’s families earn less than $80k in combined salary. The University understands that it is difficult in the current environment to contemplate an additional tuition adjustment. But unless difficult decisions are made now, affordability and quality will suffer for the long-term.

What’s notable about this decision is that the University is being completely transparent about the situation.  Going so far as to open several UserVoice forums to address concerns head on.  We’re pleased to be a part of this progressive & insightful University (as it’s also where I went to school for a short while).

See for yourself how The University of Wisconsin is leading the way in open & transparent dialogue:  http://madisoninitiative.wisc.edu

To get things started, we’ve stepped forward with four of the more popular Western European tongues:

French – German – Spanish – Dutch

This is a huge step for us, but is of course still a bit “alpha,” so if you see glitches, please feel free to post them on our pbwiki.  We expect to be rolling out many more languages as we produce localized files.  Special thanks to those who’ve helped us get started — If you’re interested in seeing UserVoice in your language, please join the team and help us out!

In addition to language translation, the UV Elves have been slaving away with some other zesty goodness:

Set Your Own Custom Vote Counts

This is another request we’ve been getting – the ability to set your own default vote count.  So instead of the the default of 10 votes, you could bump the default to 25… or maybe 3?

Look for this ability to be included for Bronze account holders and higher service levels!

Customize Your Page Titles

For all of you SEO fans out there, we’ve added the ability to customize your Page Title.  This is a great opportunity to tweak your settings and get the most bang for your buck out for Search Engine results! Settings are customizable for each individual forum, so you can optimize accordingly. Increase your Page Rank and be found on Google – better users find you and see you’re listening, than have them find a competitor!

Again, look for this feature to be included on Bronze accounts on up.

Speedier Service

You’ll also notice the speed of our service increasing. We’ve been very diligent to offload services that were slowing the service down. That coupled with a number of enhancements and updates to the backend, and you’ve now quite the zippy experience!

Improved Search

Let’s face it, our Search feature was a bit on the stinky side.  Consider it Fabrezed!  Your new searches will be faster, more accurate, and downright fresher smelling!

Finally…  Introducing Our New Chief Technology Officer

None of this would have been possible were it not for our new CTO, Dr. Scott Rutherford. Having jumped the pond from London, Scott delivers a wealth of experience, depth of  humor, and an occasional meandering around particle physics – we’re thrilled to have him aboard and his efforts are already paying off in huge dividends.  If you’re not already following him on Twitter – link him up @scottrutherford

.

UPDATE: Seesmic Chooses UserVoice

A few weeks ago, @Loic Le Meur approached us about setting up a branded UserVoice page for their video conversation website, Seesmic.  This is a nice example of how forums can be modified to match your company’s look & feel.

Check it out: http://feedback.seesmic.com

—

You may have noticed some quirkiness happening today.  We noticed some of this too.

We’re about to roll out some major changes at UserVoice that we think you’re going to be thrilled with – in preparation, we rolled out a major backend upgrade this weekend that hasn’t gone as smoothly as planned. Don’t worry, nothing major is broken — but you may see slower than normal response times and a formatting issue with some of the admin activity emails that went out this morning.

We’re actively working on these issues and hope to have resolution this evening. In the meantime we’ve suspended this afternoon’s email run. We usually try to reserve deployments until the evening (PST) but this is an important enough issue that we’ll push these fixes as soon as they’re tested.

We’ll keep you posted and I appreciate your patience.

Richard White, CEO UserVoice

• New ‘Tin’ plan ($19/mo) includes Domain Aliasing, Private Forums and more.
• New special plan for Conferences ($189/mo) includes Unlimited Voters, Domain Aliasing, Custom Design and more.
• New special plan for Open Source Projects (Free!) includes Unlimited Voters, Unlimited Forums and more.
• Running discounts for Startups, Non-Profits and Twitter apps
• Flat-rate pricing for our Platinum plan that includes Unlimited Voters.

Many of these changes came directly from YOUR feedback on our premium services forum. Get involved and tell us how we can further improve!

Pushing Tin!

We’ve just rolled out our Tin plan which is $19/mo and includes:

• Domain aliasing (Your forum on feedback.yourdomain.com; Great for SEO)
• Private forums (For private betas and internal projects)
• Analytics
• Moderation tools
• Email Support
• More forums & voters
• Ad-free

Private forums are especially useful. We use them here at UserVoice quite liberally. We have an internal team forum, one for paying customers and one for beta users. Enjoy!

Richard White
CEO, UserVoice

We’ve decided to switch to tracking usage based on the number of voters in the last 30 days. The advantages of this are:

• It’s more clear. Anyone who votes on your forum applies to your count.
• It’s doesn’t penalize you for users who haven’t returned in a while. You’re not penalized for a voting spike that occurred a few months ago.

Since these are very different numbers than all-time users there is a different usage limit now (ex: on our Bronze plan 10K users => 1K voters / month). If you login to your forum and go to /admin you’ll see a current voter count in the bottom right hand corner.

We hope this change will simplify your experience and encourage ongoing use of your forums. If you have any questions or concerns please let us know and we’ll deal with them straight away.

Thanks for your support,

Richard White
CEO, Uservoice

New Service Plan (self service sign up)
Now that we’ve been able to improve our offerings, we can finally reveal a smaller bite-sized service level for start-ups and small business.  This will be known as the Bronze Package – priced at $89/mo. (discount code below).

This plan includes:

• 10,000 Users, 6 Forums, 1 Private Forum, 6 Admins
• Moderation & Analytics
• Domain Aliasing & Single Sign On (SSO)
• Email Support

Silver Package Supercharged!
This service now includes Single Sign On, Domain Aliasing as well as access to APIs.  For and away, this is now our best valued package and sure to cover the majority of business needs.

New Administration Interface
We’re doing more to make administration of your forum even easier to use & understand. Note that the “Manage Account” has  been changed to a tab at the top that says “Admin,” in addition to a small banner being placed on the sidebar.  We’ve also made is yellow so as to stand out clearly.

we <3 skitch

New Cookie-Based Single Sign In
Now that this is in place, we’ll now be able to control access to private UserVoice forums via login. Since this is available, we’re now going to include SSO, APIs & domain aliasing in our Silver package – making it a huge value to businesses looking to dialogue with customers or employees.

Better Search
To speed up and improve UV searches, we swapped out our old search tool for a better one!

Updated Terms of Service
Now that we’re handling credit card processing, we had to add some verbiage.

So Let’s Get Started
Use discount code LIGHTNINGREFLEXES which gives the first 20 people to signup for our Bronze or Silver plans 20% off  (if you sign up before Jan 27 2009)To take advantage of this discount:If you are signing up for the first time, go to our Sign Up Page

• Login to your UserVoice Admin page.
• Look to the left – you’ll see “Subscription Plan”Select, “Change Plan.”
• Select your preferred plan.
• Insert this Coupon Code:   LIGHTNINGREFLEXES

UPDATE: Here’s the announcement you’re looking for: New Service Plan & Features

The initial goal was to provide a simple way for a WordPress administrator to add the UserVoice feedback tab to specific pages or posts on their blog.

The plugin allows the administrator to configure UserVoice options at a per-post level, which allows feedback to be gathered on multiple different topics within the same blog. Each post can be associated with a different UserVoice forum, or even different UserVoice accounts altogether. I felt that this approach would offer the most flexibility, while still remaining simple to configure.

One option for the design of the UserVoice plugin was to simply allow the administrator to enter the appropriate javascript content block to each page. In order to make the plugin accessible to the broadest audience possible (including non-technical users), it made sense instead to collect the variable data (e.g., tab position, account name, etc.) using a form, and to substitute that data into the appropriate javascript before injecting it into the page footer.

Thank you very much Chris, we really appreciate your hard work!

If you’ve created a widget or cool implementation of UserVoice, please let us know and we’ll post it here!

In the mean time, the wheels keep moving forward. Here’s what we’re rolling out today:

OpenID Support

We can now retire our second most popular request. Only thing is, we’re going to go one step further. We’ve partnered with our friends at JanRain, RPXnow allows us to release more than just OpenID support – we now support several single sign-on providers like AOL, Google, Yahoo! MySpace and even Facebook.

Using open technologies like OpenID, Attribute Exchange, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and hCard, UserVoice is now able to verify a user’s identity and match your existing userID to your OpenID (provided it’s the same email address).

Friendly URLs

To make UserVoice more SEO friendly, all profiles & suggestion entries will now have friendly URLs.

So now, instead of: http://uservoice.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/55

Will now look like this: http://uservoice.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/55-openid-user-authentication

Cool, huh?

Widget Changes

We’ve been growing fast. With this growth comes many new users. Becuase of this, we’re seeing a number of folks filling out the “bug report” on our widget thinking they are submitting an idea or suggestion.

To minimize this confusion, we’ve now moved the bug report behind the ideas list (see the very bottom of the widget display). This will be the first of many improvements we’ll be making to the widget in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned.

In the mean time, we’ll keep at it – we appreciate your continued support and feedback.

• 231 days since we launched (April 17th, 2008).
• 530k total votes logged.
• 120M+ widget impressions.
• 48.6% growth in just the last 30 days.
• 7000 forum registrations.
• 4 t’s from ChoiceShirts.

With all of this exposure, it was only a matter of time before larger companies took notice. It started out with a few requests dribbling in for standard features… things like private pages, domain aliasing and sub-forums.

Then bigger requests came down the pipe such as custom design, APIs, and single sign on. Before we knew it, we had an Enterprise level service. Thing is, we never told anyone we wanted to be an Enterprise solution, but suddenly here we are.

A new focus, a new destination – Today we’re taking off the “beta”

What does that mean for accounts created during our Beta phase? Absolutely nothing. You will keep all of the features you’ve come to depend on. Future free accounts will have a slimmer version as those little “extras” will now be reserved for paid accounts.

Going forward we’ll have multiple tiers of service addressing internal users, non-profits, and of course Fortune 5000 companies. Are you a start-up? We haven’t forgotten you either, Sign Up to discover extra special pricing.

We’re also thrilled to reveal some companies we’re working with. We haven’t talked much about customers before – mostly ’cause we don’t aim to be a destination for feedback. We’d rather keep users on your site, not pull them away.

In the near future you’ll be hearing about a number of new tools and features that will only further this objective. We want to be the easiest and most accessible feedback platform available. With your help, we’re well on our way.

Thank you for choosing UserVoice!

P.S. Care to give feedback on our service plans

Here it is, Saturday and I’m just now getting to post a follow-up! What an amazing night we had with the folks at 12seconds.  A couple hundred people joined us for our Launch Party and we have to say, we’re honored if you played a part. Even Robert Scoble stopped by for a tour and a drink or three.

If you’d like to see some of the videos recorded at the event – check out the 12seconds blog post!

If you were able to make it (or meant to come but couldn’t), thank you so much for supporting us!  We had a great time meeting all of you – especially those who took the party bus from San Francisco!  We heard you had extra special fun!

Also want to say thank you to Kid Kameleon, DJ Ripley, as well as @beach from 12seconds for DJing the party – it was a great team effort!  Thank you guys for the great music & cooperation.  Mostly, thank you @emilyjo & @thesolster for decorating & coordinating the party – Thanks!

***note*** if you post photos on flickr, please use the tag #UV12Launch so we can identify the photos!

Come share a pint, mingle with the “locals,” and check out the happenings for these scrappy little start-ups! There might even be a few surprises…

***Update*** - Kid Kameleon and DJ Ripley in the house spinning the wax!!! That’s right, we’re bringing in San Francisco’s finest DJs to set the tempo for the night!!!

For our friends in San Francisco – we have a charted bus picking up passengers from Glen Park Bart Station @ 5pm and whisk you away to Santa Cruz – returning between 12 and 1am.  Grab a cooler, fill it with some drinks and take it aboard the party bus to get started early. RSVP -Emily Nelson @emilyjo -or- emily [at] uservoice dot com  —  A donation of $25 appreciated for bus

See also Upcoming -or- Facebook

Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/uservoice
Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/12seconds

Sponsors:
Uncommon Brewers
Lighthouse Bank

UserVoice: “Iain, I was wondering how things were going with your TweetDeck development.  Would you care to share your experience so far with UserVoice?”

Iain: “The most obvious experience I’ve had using UserVoice is the benefit of not having to keep track of all the suggestions people make about the application. This benefit comes in two parts, the amount of time saved and not being overly distracted when focusing on development. It also seems that having a suggestion written down in front of them, encourages some users to comment on suggestions – so not only do I get the original suggestion logged but I also get possible refinements to that suggestion (via the comments) pretty much without having to lift a finger. In fact the only thing I have had to do is set up the page in the first place – which was essentially a few introductory lines of copy, a logo and a few suggestions of my own to get the ball rolling.”

UserVoice: “Any idea what percentage of your users have engaged your UserVoice page since you’ve been pushing it?”

Iain: “As an incredibly rough estimate I’d say it’s around the 15-20% mark.”

UserVoice: “So you’re saying that of all your users, 15-20% are active on UserVoice? That’s amazing!”

Iain: “Actually I’m saying around 15-20% of the total user base HAVE been active at one point or another – I doubt they are all active on a general basis.”

Statistically speaking, this truly is outstanding.  Consider this graph of Community Engagement I found via Jeremiah Owyang’s Web-Strategist blog:

Above Image: Gartner’s Generation V Quadrant, found via Marketing Charts.

If the average involvement of contributors is 3-10%, how the heck is TweetDeck arriving at such an astounding level of 15-20%?  I had to ask the obvious question…

UserVoice: “Alright, so you’ve got all of this rich feedback – How are you priming the pump as it were to get people involved?”

Iain: “The thing I’ve done, and this is rather vital, is drive users to the TweetDeck UserVoice site in order to add their suggestion. I’ve done this in two very simplistic ways:

1.  Add the UserVoice tab to the TweetDeck homepage.
2.  When someone makes a suggestion via Twitter, I ask them to add (or vote on if already suggested) this to the site.

I haven’t yet had a single person refuse to do this – every single person I’ve spoken to has been more than happy. People who make the effort to suggest a feature or tell you what’s wrong with your application actually care a lot about it or they wouldn’t bother – so getting them to commit their ideas/criticisms to the UserVoice page is a very natural thing to do. And of course, it is the opinion of these people who use TweetDeck and care about its continued development that I hold with most importance and LISTEN to.”

UserVoice: “Has implementing a UserVoice feedback forum had an effect in the way you are developing Tweetdeck?”

Iain: “It’s worth pointing out that from day one I have had a vision for TweetDeck, I know exactly where I want it to end up, what functionality it will eventually have. Whilst I agree that an application “designed by committee” will become a Camel (as opposed to the horse it should be), not listening to the TweetDeck users/community – and blindly following my own path will lead to a superb application that no-one but I will want to use. There has to be room for new ideas. And who is arrogant enough to profess they’ve had all the best ideas and know the best way to implement all the features? This is why I’m sticking to overall vision for TweetDeck, but the route we take to get there is definitely being defined by the suggestions found on the UserVoice page.

This way, I know exactly what TweetDeck users want next – by virtue of the voting for each suggestion, and we work towards that together. And of course, along the way the community let’s me know of any new bugs that creep in. Without UserVoice I’d have been left with a whole wall of post-it notes and been overloaded with data – which would have been a bit ironic since that is exactly the situation I built TweetDeck to solve.”

He said to call ChoiceShirts, where you could customize your own design and all that good stuff. So I fired off an email and that’s when things got interesting. First off, I got an immediate follow on Twitter. Then a confirmation email asking when, where and all that. So far so good.

Then they made a video?

Yes, they made a video.

Not only did we get amazing quality shirts, customer service & super fast delivery – we also got a music video of our shirts in production. On top of that, he printed one up for himself! How cool is that?

If you’d like to have one of these fancy-dancy shirts for yourself, please march on over to ChoiceShirts.com and ORDER ONE!

Thanks guys – You Rock!

Today we’re happy to present a Privacy Setting available to all forums.  This feature filters out audience member logins based on email addresses.  If a non-member were to stumble upon your page, they could request to have access, but the forum Admin would have to either accept or reject the inquiry.

Forum Admins will find this new setting in the “Edit Forum” section of the admin dashboard (see image).

We think this is going to make many users happy.

Maybe you’re one of them?!

Allegedly, there was a discussion about social media & feedback at the Fuel Conference last week.  One of the responsible party members, Ryan Carson of Carsonified, was nice enough to have mentioned UserVoice.

Yesterday he announced they had set up a page for their upcoming Future of Web Design conference in New York. The announcement generated a fair amount of traffic, however not all of the traffic was helpful. A number of anonymous types left some rather unusual posts – which prompted a conversation about anonymous posting.

In some cases, having anonymous posts can be healthy, good and productive.  In other cases, there may be an excuse to be silly and generally unhelpful.

Yesterday’s experience with the FoWD page showed what happens when silliness gets out of hand. Ryan & company had sincere efforts for gathering feedback for potential speakers – but a few readers took advantage.  So after hearing his concern – we rolled out a fix ahead of schedule.

If you are an account owner on UserVoice, sign in and click on “Manage Account“ in the upper right hand corner of your UserVoice page.

You’ll see it now says, “Allow Anonymous Feedback?” on the right-hand sidebar. It says “true” by default – but, if you are an account owner, you can click this link and select, “false” which will prevent all further anonymous feedback.

So again – thanks go out to Ryan Carson for utilizing UserVoice and also for pushing the agenda to make anonymous users optional. There was also a request that prompted the original consideration of this feature by our user redrum - so we also want to thank redrum for contributing the initial idea.

Old

New

We’ve switched to a design that more closely resembles that of an embedded forum. Our primary goal was to put more emphasis on your brand and make it clear to your users that this is *your* page.

Our secondary goal was to explain to users our role as a facilitator of the discussion. We’ve placed ‘powered by UserVoice’ logos at the bottom of the login and signup forms something we hope, along with the more forum-like layout, will better explain the difference between a UserVoice account and one from the parent site.

This also sets us up to be able to embed UserVoice into any page on your site. We’ll keep you posted on our progress

A few other improvements:

• Admins may create as many suggestions as they want without spending their votes. This will let them import suggestions or “seed” the page with existing ideas.
• Ability to embed a single suggestion in another page. Useful for referencing a suggestion when blogging about how you fixed it. Note that this suggestion requires you to click-through before adding votes, comments, etc.For example:
  <script src="http://uservoice.uservoice.com/suggestions/454.embed" type="text/javascript"></script>

  We’ll have a dialog in the sidebar of each suggestion page to make this easier shortly.