Hi guys and gals,

We’ve been busy adding a bunch of new goodies and features over the past few week or so, some of which you may have already discovered.  Without further ado, I’ll just get to the list:

• Battlecrog - Battlecrog.  Yes, it’s an ugly word, but someone has to invent it.  A battlecrog is essentially an on-going log of your battlecries.  If you go to Battlecrog in the menu under My Stuff, you can see your own battle cries, those from your friends/foes and even those from other ibeatyou users.  It’s a great way to see what other people are up to on ibeatyou!

• Measured Competitions - Since the beginning, we’ve always wanted ibeatyou to be a site where you could challenge your friend in any type of competition.  While ibeatyou let you win competitions through a rating system, we didn’t have a way to win competitions that were based on results that could be measured.  Well, we built out something called Measured Competitions (if someone can think of a snappier name, PM me!), where you can compete in things, well, that are measurable, like Most Free Throws in a minute, Most Pushups in 30 seconds, or just anything that is quantifiable!  To kick it off, we created a competition that I know you’ve all been dying to see: Who Has the BIGGEST HEAD!   Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

… Before we continue, I have to show you something REALLY important…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…and now, back to the blog posting…

• Hello, Bebo! - Woohoo!  For those of you on Bebo, you can now compete with your friends on Bebo with the ibeatyou application!  Add it now and invite your Bebo friends to do the same.  Then beat’em down!  You’ll be able to do pretty much the same things on ibeatyou, but from Bebo; you can see compete against other Bebo users and build up your rank in the Bebo leaderboard! If you dont’ do Bebo, just a reminder that we also have our MySpace application there too!

• Better Inviting - You can now send competition invites and shared entries with your Fave Friends only or to a specific group.  Now there’s no excuse for being a bad competition spammer inviter.

• Withdrawing Entries - You can now withdraw your entry during the first hour after its submission.  This is for folks who really really really get hyper-hypo excited when they OMG!OMG!OMG! see a competition they just TOTALLY HAVE TO JOIN and forget to read all/any rules that they promptly break.  Just go to your competition log and click the Edit button next to the entry you’d like to withdraw.  You’ll see a button to allow you to do that.  Note that you’ll lose the +5 points that you gained when first entering.

There have been a bunch of other goodies, tweaks and fixes we’ve been putting in, some more evident than others.

As always, keep us posted with your comments, feedback, etc.  Apologies as we can’t reply to all your mails, but rest assured we do read and appreciate them.  Now, I gotta get back to practicing my air cowbell for the Best Air Instrument competition!

Cheers,
Steve and the ibeatyou Beatdown Squad

Hey Ibsters,

Just when you thought you’ve seen it all on ibeatyou, we proudly welcome Jon M. Chu, film director and dance guru behind “Step Up 2: The Streets” and Adam/Chu Dance Crew (aka ACDC).

In his first competition, Jon brings us America’s Dance Party, a dance off competition between The Obamanators (supporters of Barack Obama) and The McCainiacs (supporters of John McCain). So, you might ask, ‘What do dancing and the Presidential election have in common?’ Everything! As America continues to search for new leadership in the coming weeks, what better way to decide who should lead than a dance off between Democrats and Republicans? Forget the crazy electoral voting system! Let’s settle it here.

If you know who to vote for, then wear your party’s colors, and show us what you got. Show your support, be heard and represent your party.

Hey Ibsters,

A few updates to the site.  A few that some of you’ve probably discovered already, but I’ll just point them out here…and awaayyyyy we go:

•  Photo albums -You now can upload up to 60 photos to your profile.  Check out Gotgame in action! Yeee!
•  New notification digest - Yeah, our old email digest, was ugly.  We admit it.  We tried to make it more interesting and relevant (and weekly).  If you haven’t received it yet, be sure to set alert settings in your profile to “digest”.  Also, you might want to peek into your Spam folder; if it somehow made it in there, be sure to Flag the email as NOT spam, so you can get them delivered in the future.  Yay!
• About Me - Some people wanted to express themselves more than just through a battle cry.  Now you can write a little blurb about yourself and your snail collection.  Huzzah!
• Media filter in your competition log - Now you can view and filter your entries by type: video, photo or text. Hurray!

Some other little things we’ve adjusted include the usual bug squashes, things to make the site load faster and other tweaks, like the My Groups page.

One other thing we’ve put in is an easier way for you to get +10 points for your friends’ registrations.  When you click the Invite button on the site, you will see a URL that you can copy and pass on (blog, IM, email) to your friends.  If they register through this link…voila, 10 easy points!  This URL will contain a code that is just your username and can be used as many times as possible.  For instance, my referral invite URL is:

http://www.ibeatyou.com/register/ucode/steve

Go ahead.  Friend me!

Cheerio,

Steve and the ibeatyou Squad

In this  day and age, we are deluged with all sorts of information at all times of the day wherever we go…emails, text messages, IMs, phone calls, TV or radio ads, random sales people at your door, junk mail…it doesn’t end.  No, I don’t want a Pancake Puff pan!  No, I don’t need to buy a Magic Closet Space Maker.  And no, I don’t want sign a petition to support the Save the Snails Foundation.

Anyways, as ibeatyou has grown, the notifications feature has evolved from a simple way to alert you to a few things, to an important tool on the site to keep track of what’s going on your friends.  However, with the larger number of users on the site, it’s also become increasingly difficult to filter the “noise” and junk out from the good stuff.  We’ve received a lot of cool suggestions from everyone on how to make notifications relevant; we then put some of our ideas together,  filled up on pizza and Vitamin Water, and then coded away.  A few things introduced today:

• Fave Friends: Basically, it’s a way to create a PRIVATE list of your top 25 favorite friends on ibeatyou.  With your Fave Friends list, you will be able to filter competition invites and shared entry notifications by each friend on your fave list. First person that I’m adding to my Fave Friends?  N0Caffeine.  Her competitions are HAWT!

Your Fave Friends list can be accessed from the Your Friends and Foes page at the Edit Your Fave Friends link.  A key thing to remember is that while it is currently used to help filter some notifications, you may start seeing it used in other parts of ibeatyou.  If you have any cool ideas where you want to see it being used, send us a note!

• Ignore List:  To further help organize and reduce clutter (I don’t like junk on my desk) in your notifications, we’ve also added the Ignore List.  This basically is a list where you can use when you JUUUUST don’t have the heart to take someone off your friend list, but their competition invites bug the FRAK out of you.  In this case, you can add this friend to your ignore list.  You can still message them and get notifications of some types from them.  For now, the Ignore list will work when you want to block certain friends from spamming sending you competition invites and shared entries.

In addition to these and a few “under the hood”  tweaks and fixes, another update we’ve added is the ability to go SMACK 2 SMACK!

One can barely fathom the PURE AWESOMENESS of the name of this feature.  But generally, now, when someone leaves Smack Talk on your profile, you can click the SMACK 2 SMACK link to see your conversation thread with that person.  Now start SMACK2SMACKing!

Whew, this is the longest post I’ve written in awhile.  Getting tired already.  Maybe I’ll provide a little break with a…

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LOLCAT!!!!

Anyways, wanted to also let everyone know that we hear your feedback.  We’ve been busy tackling a bunch of things but keep an eye out in the next few weeks for some even cooler changes.  One of them, even sounds cooler than SMACK2SMACKing!  Another enhancement we’ll be rolling out shortly includes improving our notification email digests; yeah, we think they need to get fixed up too.  In the meantime, keep that feedback coming!  We live on that stuff…

Thanks!

- Steve and the ibeatyou Squad (cdubya, mike, waynester, rsoni)

My first IBY blog…but believe it or not this is my fourth attempt. The previous three all included ImHungry and a video camera and understandably we both felt we had done enough embarrassing vids that we shouldn’t have to subject ourselves to poor vlogging. Leave the vlogging up to those that do it really well. Who knows though we may give it another go in the near future.

So this past week I attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver with my wife and daughter and feel compelled to write about it. This was our first trip as a family. As always, we arrived at the airport way to close to our departure time so it was hectic. After cussing out the two lame photogs that were waiting at the airport for Jay_eh we made our way through security and boarded our flight. It’s always nerve-racking for new parents to fly with their child because you never know if you’re going to ruin everyone else’s flight with a screaming baby. (To date, Honor has been a great baby. Rarely crying. Opting to express herself through simple Haiku’s or interpretive dance instead…yeah right. My girl’s got opinions. lol). We sit down and cross our fingers that she will sleep. She does J. Nothing really exciting happened on the flight except the energy of what was to come was already palpable. We landed in Denver and headed to the hotel to change so we could go watch Bill Clinton speak.

Seeing Clinton speak in person was like seeing a HOF athlete return to their sport. The room was electric. He received a 10min standing ovation and then calmly delivered an endorsement for Obama as only Clinton could do. I think the most effective part of his speech was when he compared BO to himself as youngster from Arkansas who everyone thought was too young and inexperienced to run the country. It seems like we are always getting distracted in politics from the real issues. Experience doesn’t mean anything if it’s not the right experience and no experience is paralleled to running the country. I think the best leaders are those that surround themselves with smarter people than themselves and understand how to properly delegate. My top 5 issues this election are about: the US economy, US educational system, US global relevance, Iraq War, and the environment.

After Clinton’s speech we went to a Voto Latino event to help raise awareness about the importance of voter registration. Registering to vote takes five minutes out of your day and is the first step to being active. So many people like to complain about what’s broken but don’t like to take the necessary steps to help fix it. If you haven’t registered and need a place to do so check out these links:

http://www.declareyourself.org/

http://www.votolatino.org/

http://www.rockthevote.org/

The next day Barack Obama made me remember why I love being part of the world in this day and age. I’m sure some candidates of the past have been amazing to watch, but Barack held a crowd of 80,000 captive and evoked emotions ranging from crying to laughing in 30 minutes. I have pictures to prove it. Barack has this uncanny ability to speak to a room of 80,000 but yet you feel he is speaking directly to you. I have been to Superbowls, NBA Championships, Academy Awards, etc but none of them compare to what it was like sitting inside of Invesco Field that day. I will remember this day for the rest of my life.

No matter who you vote for, the important thing is to do your research and go out and vote. This is one of our precious rights and we should all take advantage of this and voice our opinions. So please do check out the links and get out and vote. Like I mentioned earlier, it only takes a few minutes!

-CashMoney

	Jessica and I went to see Obama speak with this group of friends. Someone rented us this unbelievably ridiculous bus…felt like we were going to prom. I’m thankful though because we got to skip some long lines
	we saw Al and Tipper Gore!
	the wife and me being patriotic.
	Jay_eh with the secret service.
	saw some of the best outfits I had seen in a long time. Have you ever seen the american flag look so fashionable?!
	Jay-eh took this pic of me as the confetti was falling. amazing times!!
	this is how close we got to sit!
	definitely was an emotional evening. saw this man standing next to me and had to snap a shot.
	A friend got these custom nikes made. killer!