A few months ago, we started to display how many views a topic had. At first this seemed to go unnoticed, but lately I’ve had a lot of questions about this. The most common is, “Why does this user’s list have 10,000 views, while mine only has 250?”

The fact is, when you go to the trouble of creating a new topic, it’s nice to see some discussion and activity on it. Stirring up some buzz and getting this to happen is actually pretty simple.  To help dispel some of the confusion, I’ll take a few moments to share some tips for creating popular topics.

Make ‘em interesting

It goes without saying that some lists are just going to attract views for having an emotional connection, or better yet, being out of the ordinary. I’m not that interested in “best socks”, but I’d find it hard to not read, “Most embarrassing date moments.” (My guess is that others feel similarly.)

Get the ball rolling

A big part of getting traffic and activity on your topic involves being featured on the homepage. This immediately brings a lot of people to your topic from MakeFive, but also from our Twitter feed and associated re-tweets.

To get “featured”, you need an interesting topic, but it also helps to fill it in a little. Add an enticing topic image that will present well if featured. Write a tempting description (good for SEO), and even add a few items to the list. No one wants to be the first to “dance”, but once someone’s on the floor, all kinds of people want to join-in.

Check back and comment

Discussion begets discussion, and as such, we’ve created tools to help you along with this. Be sure to “watch” (button in top-right sidebar of each topic) topics you’ve created, and those you are interested in. By doing so, the system will start to notify you of comments as they are added to these topics. Then get in and reply when you can. Nothing builds interest in your topic like added dialogue.

Spread the word

Of course, a lot of the traffic for topics comes from other sites and social media. The “Simpsons’ quotes” topic that I started was recently Dugg. As a result it has 119,212 views, and counting. (To be honest, I was rather surprised by this amount of traffic.)

Getting this kind of attention for your topic isn’t easy, but there are a few steps that can help. First of all, use the “Share” buttons at the bottom of the topic. Digg and StumbleUpon can really be huge! Plus, getting your friends to join-in (through Twitter and Facebook) can help you attract attention and subsequently result in a high-traffic topic.

The life of the party…

Most of us like being the one who starts an exciting conversation at a party. I think that many of us feel the same way about MakeFive. Creating a good topic is a lot of work–hopefully these tips help you reap the rewards of a great discussion!

Our office is a bit of a steam-bath today, and we’re really feeling it. And as much as I love the sun, I have to say that my allergies are getting in the way of enjoying the warmth. (I’m currently working a mix of Claritin, Flonase, saline, and a big box of Kleenex–what’s your pollen fighting solution?) But I digress. The point here is to talk about this week in MakeFive.

wesm12 edged out plmiller and Schligge and won the MakeFive Contest for the second consecutive week. So, now he’s two t-shirts and $200 richer. And what about you? Perhaps you got some work done at the office, but wouldn’t it be nicer to have cash and clothing? C’mon… that spreadsheet can wait… ;-)

I often beg MakeFive users to lend a hand with StumbleUpon and Digg. Frankly, those two sites send us a lot of traffic and in turn help us build the MakeFive community. So, if you feel so inclined, please lend us a hand by giving us a little digg here: http://digg.com/d1pCgh

In fact, you should really vote first, as it’s a great topic, thanks to DoeFromTO. Here are the current top five:

See more: Your ultimate dinner party

Well, that’s it for this time. Have a great week and keep those sinuses clear!

karj

There are good things happening at MakeFive HQ. We moved, we’re lean(er), and we’re working like bananas on new features.

Lean and mean

Lately a big time-suck here has involved moving and getting skinny. Over the past few months we wanted to get our burn-rate down as low as possible. In part this helps given the dodgy economy. More than that though, doing so allows us to put even more time into MakeFive. So, after a massive purge and reorganization, we’re in our new home. (Photos to come.)

Last week’s winner

wesm12 picked up the prize for most points for the week ending April 10th. It seemed to be a bit of a tight race between him and plmiller, both of whom battled it out to win the shirt and cash. As we’ve noted in the past, the contest isn’t the point of the site, but it sure is a nice little bonus!

What we liked

There are always interesting new lists popping-up on MakeFive, but as staunch hockey-haters, this one didn’t do anything for Shelkie and I. That being said, we expect that it’s a topic of some importance for everyone else.

See more: Whose gonna Win the 2009 Stanley Cup

Well, that’s it for this week. Have fun, make lists and prosper.

Karj

As some of you may have noticed, we’re really encouraging reviews on MakeFive these days. It’s great to see what someone has picked, and it’s even more interesting to know why. This is particularly nice when it comes to attractions, restaurants, movies, et cetera. Reviews have the potential to make the community stronger and more interesting because they are about what you think.

As an incentive, we’re currently giving out 50 karma points for every review. We figure that it’s a fair number given the time it takes to write a good review of something. Unfortunately, some have figured this out, and are just inserting any content they can find in order to collect the points. For example, we’re finding a lot of wikipedia descriptions being used for reviews. This sort of sucks and certainly doesn’t do anything for the community.

Ripped content breaks the one rule of the contest, which is, “Don’t post junk.” As such, we have to wipe points in such instances. That being said, for most of you this isn’t an issue. You’re adding reviews where you have something to say, and we love that.  :-)

Have a great weekend!

We’ve had stellar traffic recently, breaking any of our past records. In fact, a whopping 140,000 people visited MakeFive last week. That’s a lot, and we’re happy to connect with so many new people!

Contest news

The new contest seems to be bringing some added activity. Congratulations go out to plmiller who won $100 and a sassy MakeFive t-shirt in last week’s contest! We know that $100 isn’t a huge amount, but we think it’s a fun little incentive. Plus, it’s more fun than working, isn’t it?

Nice topic!

Last week’s “Dude.. nice topic!” shout-out goes to dougf for his new topic “Great Movies You Don’t Get“. Really, how many times have you sat on the couch wondering, “Is Blockbuster still open? Could I just trade this thing in for Caddyshack or Police Academy?” Here are the current top five:

See more: Great Movies You Don’t Get

Twitter

We’re really stoked about some Twitter integration we’ve recently made. In case you missed it, you can now auto-Twitter your lists (read the full article here). And if you haven’t already, you can now follow us on Twitter.

Ch-ch-ch-changes…

Although I don’t want to give much away on this, I should note that we have some big changes underway. In fact, it looks like MakeFive’s going to get a sex change or something similar. We’ll have details soon.

Well, that was last week… Make lists and carry on. :-)

We’ve had a number of users ask us about the ability to automatically tweet the lists they vote on. Today we’ve activated this function in MakeFive, but it’s taken us a while to get here.

Our hold-up in getting this started is largely a result of us waiting for a secure authentication method to be adopted by Twitter before integrating with our user accounts. For some of you, this probably doesn’t mean much. I’ll explain.

Lately, there has been a lot of unfavorable publicity regarding security breaches of Twitter accounts. Actually, given the apparent disregard with which many users treat their account info, I’m a little surprised there haven’t been more large-scale exploits. I’ve been guilty of this as well; barely pausing to think before providing my password to any cool new utility that claims it will perform miracles by filtering, sorting or auto-following, etc.

Your average user likely thinks, “So what’s the big deal? I’ll just change my password if someone starts impersonating me.” Problem is: most of us are lazy. If you’re like me, thinking up and remembering a different password for every site is just too much work. My bet is that most people rely on a very small set of passwords for all of the services they use. It’s unlikely that people are going to stop doing this, so developers like us have to be sure that those passwords don’t fall into the wrong hands.

This is where Twitter has received much criticism. In order for any third party tool to work with Twitter, you need to disclose your username and password. (Yikes!) Subsequently, when that service interacts with your Twitter account, it must send your (unencrypted) username and password via the Twitter API. This is not a good thing.

Thankfully, this should become a thing of the past within the next short while. Twitter has been working on the integration OAuth (a secure method of connecting accounts) and has just made it available to all developers. As a result, instead of asking users for their Twitter login info, we can now simply direct them to a special page on Twitter that takes care of the user authentication for us. When completed successfully, we receive a token that allows our site to interact with the user’s Twitter account. And if the user decides they don’t like us any more, all they need to do is revoke our permission from within their Twitter profile. (Previously, the only way to deny access once you’ve allowed third-party access to your profile is to change your Twitter password.)

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a big step in the right direction. Twitter still needs to implement further checks such as an optional whitelist of servers that can make API calls using its designated app key.

That my (pretty quick) rundown of Twitter and OAuth on MakeFive. I think we’ve managed to make it a pretty seamless process. Now, go and vote on a couple of lists to try it out.  :-)   www.makefive.com

Sometimes the notion of giving away money seems like fun. (Well, at least we figure that’s how it must feel.) Regardless, it’s a crappy Monday afternoon, the rain is coming down in buckets, and we want to mix things up a little.

Some of you folks are really active here, and we greatly appreciate that. You see, the more active you are, the more content there is. As the content level and activity rise, the closer we are to quitting our “day jobs” and working on MakeFive all day long. (This would be, in a word: awesome.)

So, here’s the deal. As an added bonus, every Friday we’ll be giving away $100 to the person who has accumulated the most points here on MakeFive. The rules are simple: don’t post shitty content. Outside of that, the sky’s the limit. Make fun lists, start great topics, and engage in a little debate. What the heck? You might even take home a little extra beer money as a result!

(If you’d like more details, you can find them here.)

We just released an update to the MakeFive Facebook app! We think it’s a pretty neat one, as it shows your friends on Facebook what you are voting on. (It also lets you showcase your favorite lists in your Facebook tabs.)

Here’s how to do it:
- Click here to install the MakeFive Facebook app
- Go to “Profile” in Facebook
- Click the “+” sign in your tabs (just under your name and status)
- Choose MakeFive (see… easy, right?)

A lot of people have asked us to add Twitter integration as well, so that a tweet would be sent when you vote on a list. We’re working on this too, and hope to have it live in the next couple of days.

So… February has come to a close, as has our first month of weekly winners on MakeFive. It’s been an interesting experiment to date, and we’re pretty happy with the results.

For those of you who are new to the site, a little background. Up until recently, the “What do you know?” contest was running on a monthly basis with a larger prize up for grabs, but this model seemed to be broken. We were seeing a great deal of activity at the start of the month, so that people could gain a strong lead, and then activity would drop-off through the middle of the month. By the last week, we’d see a storm of activity by one or two users, who would collect tens of thousands of points, just to win the iPod.

Generally, the large blocks of activity were fine. That being said, in the rush to “win”, some of the additions turned into pure crap. (We kept scratching our heads with this one–an iPod only costs $200. Why was it making people so crazy?)

Many of the regular users sent us long pleas, requesting that we end the contest or at very least kill the iPod. We finally did so, and some interesting things happened

First of all, the amount of content created was almost the same as any month with the iPod as proverbial carrot dangling in front of the community. That being said, the topics and voting seemed to become spread-out more evenly over the course of the month.

Although JonathanB won in the first week, plmiller seemed to become the new reigning queen of MakeFive, taking home a t-shirt for three weeks in a row. Curiously, she sent us an email noting that she thought she should curtail her MakeFive activity, so that others could also win. (Don’t slow-down Peggy–you’ve added a lot of great content as of late.)

To our surprise, no one has complained about the contest changing. In fact, the whole discussion around it seems to have fallen in to what we think is its proper place. Now, it seems like the topics and content have taken center stage, with the contest being what it was always supposed to be: a fun part of it, but not the whole point.

The content is becoming more engaging, the discussions are getting better, and plmiller can wear a fresh MakeFive t-shirt every two days (assuming that she does laundry once a week.)

Happy trails gang!

That’s right; the January numbers are in, and we have our winners:

1. ryankoziel (38,374 points)
2. joshwritescopy (25,720 points)
3. webdesign (17,808 points)
4. DGfromMTL (12,267 points)
5. dantes_inferno2003 (12,265 points)

For all of you in the top five, your prizes will be in the mail shortly. For those of you who still haven’t received winnings from last month, you have only me to blame. I’ve been really bad about getting them in the mail. (Sorry. I’ll have your stuff out to you pronto.)

You’ll note some pretty high scores this month. This comes down to our perpetual tweaking of the contest. Content creators now gain the most points, particularly for adding photos and reviews. So, don’t just vote; share why you’ve made your selections!

This leads to the biggest change we’ve made to the contest in a while. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, we typically have a few users that “break from the pack” early in the month which makes it difficult for new users to have any chance of catching up. To remedy this, we’re going to try running the contest on a weekly basis instead. This should level things out a bit, and give everyone something to do each Friday afternoon :-)

Unfortunately we can’t afford to send out $1,000 in iPods every month, so instead the person with the most points gets a shirt and bragging rights. We’ll see how this works and tweak as necessary.

As always, we’re hard at work to make this a better and more enjoyable site for you. Stay warm and have a February!

Eric