News

I’m in a writing mood today, so I figure I will venture outside of Commuto and write about a great game I played last night.  It’s called Braid for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade.  It’s created by Jonathan Blow, whose games I’ve never played before, so this might be his first release of a large commercial game, but it’s a wonderful one.

Braid is a puzzle game where you can reverse time whenever you wish, so basically you can never die, which my wife appreciated.   However, the puzzles are very well thought out and original.  I’ve played games before which featured time control, but most were action games, and the puzzle elements were uninspiring.  This is like the first time I played Portal, and proceed to not put the game down.  It challenges your mind in ways that you have never been challenged before, and unfortunately, like Portal, it ends way too soon.  What is it about these games which are so well done, that they have to end so quickly?  I suppose it’s difficult to think of so many original puzzles, or maybe it’s the limitation of the size of the game, but it always seems like the best games are over way too quickly.

I wish Jonathan the best of luck with this game.  I read his blog where he discusses quite honestly why the price of $15, (which to some may seem over priced for an Xbox Live game, but I assure you it isn’t), is the right price and how a game like this, which hasn’t received a lot of hype, might not sell as well as he’d like.  It’s unfortunate that other games which have a 10th of the originality sell many time more.  Hopefully this won’t be the case this time.

Thanks,

Stephen

Wired magazine has written an article on how to spot a fake listing on Craigslist and Ebay.  Unfortunately, Craigslist is having massive issues with fraudulent listings, some reports list it as high as 40%.  With popularity and success come those who will try to take advantage, and we are committed to minimize this as much as possible.  Regardless, some of these points are valid also with Commuto, so here is the list with my comments:

1. “Try to deal only with locals you can meet in person.” - This is a great point and is actually the foundation of Commuto.  One of the big reasons we thought local trading communities would be succesful is because they would help minimize fradulent listings since you are meeting with the person and are likely go to the same school, office or social group.

2. “Insist on cash.” - Doesn’t apply to Commuto since we are dealing with the trade of goods and not selling them.  Regardless, some users might actually end up selling their goods, so make sure you don’t except fake cheques or money orders.

3. “Never wire money to anyone under any circumstances.” - Again, doesn’t apply to Commuto, but it’s still common sense.

4. “Craigslist plays no part in transactions.” - This is true to Commuto as well.  We do not guarantee your trading partners, so please use common sense when interacting with someone.  If a posting or inquiry seems suspicious then do not get involved.

As for eBay; it’s obviously much riskier than any trading site since you have to send your money in advance and hope that you will receive your goods.  eBay does all it can to help its users not get scammed, and considering the size and scope of eBay, they do an excellent job.  But again, meeting in person with members of your school, workplace, city, or other social communities is the safest way to make sure that you get what you want without any surprises.  If you see anything that you consider to be suspicious, make sure you contact our support team at support@commuto.com.

Thanks and Trade Friendly,

Stephen

Below is a list of all the contest winners for our “A Book A Day” Contest. This will be updated daily:

August 1st - Corinna Chaney - Los Angeles
August 2nd - Allison Noyes - Iowa City
August 3rd - Gabriela Melara - Santa Monica
August 4th - Natasha Helton - Los Angeles
August 5th - Benjamin Pant - Norwich
August 6th - A Valentino - San Francisco
August 7th - George Wood - Alabaster
August 8th - Rhachel Shaw - Los Angeles
August 9th - Nathan Mutchler - Terre Haute
August 10th - Dayna C - Los Angeles
August 11th - Michelle Levitas - Los Angeles

Good luck to everyone who is participating and don’t forget to invite your friends to join as well.

Contest rules are detailed in the blog post below.

Thanks,

Stephen

We are happy to announce our book a day contest which will start on August 1st, 2008 and will go until the end of the month. Every day for the month of August we will be giving away one book to one of our members. In order to qualify you have to follow these simple rules:

1. Be a member of Commuto (pretty obvious)
2. Post some books you want in your Wish List

That’s it. Doesn’t get much easier than that. At the end of every day a member will be chosen randomly to receive one of the books listed in his/her Wish List. The book will be purchased by us through Amazon and sent directly to whatever address you provide us.

This contest is open to everyone, no matter where you live, seeing as Amazon can ship pretty much anywhere. The earlier you sign on and post items the more chances you will have to win, so start posting. The only condition is that Amazon must carry your book so don’t start posting first editions of Oliver Twist. That’s a little out of our budget.

Thanks and trade friendly,

Stephen

Thanks to our friends at Contest Alley for mentioning the contest.

Cool Contests,
Great Prizes at
Contest Alley

Hi…

It’s been a hellish few weeks. We had a surge of new users that, thankfully, made us aware of many bugs and issues that went unrealized. We have rewritten our trade generator logic which was, ummmm…fun. We have also added new features based on user recommendations to make your Commuto experience much more interactive and exciting. The following features and changes have now been implemented:

Security Settings: We have added a new link in your profile page called “Security Settings”. In there you will find the options to control the type of emails you will be receiving from Commuto. You now have the option to control the following emails:

• Promotional Emails
• Updates and Changes Emails
• Emails notifying you when Commuto members send you messages

You can also control who can send you messages (anyone in Commuto or just members in your communities).

Suspend Account: You can now suspend your own account when you will be unavailable for an extended amount of time. Suspending your account will make your profile and all your items invisible to other members until you have decided to reinstate your account. So now when you go on vacation or are sent to jail you don’t have to worry about trade proposals. Actually, jails could make for wonderful trading communities.

We have also added the following countries with their states/provinces/regions and cities:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Ukraine
• United Kingdom

If you registered from any one of the countries above please go into your profile page and edit your location to add your state/province/region and city. Also, if you have any friends from these countries now is the time to invite them to Commuto. We will continue adding more countries as quickly as we can, and we look forward to providing you with new features as we continue to develop Commuto into the most interactive and popular social bartering site online.

Thanks and trade friendly,

Stephen

Congratulations to Laura J from Los Angeles, California.  Laura is the winner of a $250 gift card for Amazon.com in our random draw held today for all our members who gave us a chance so early on.

Thank you to everyone else who joined Commuto and trade friendly.

Stephen

Early this morning Daily Candy wrote a wonderful mention of Commuto.com in their Los Angeles edition. This was the epitome of a good day gone wrong. We started off flying, with everyone here very excited about the prospects of what’s about to happen today. We knew there was a chance of some technical difficulties, but we managed to allocate all the servers resources to Commuto and were hoping that any issues that occur would be minor and short lived. Boy were we wrong. Daily Candy is a monster. They brought so much traffic that we managed to crash our severs several times throughout the day, and whenever we were operating we were doing so very slowly.

We will be upgrading our servers on Thursday night and will be able to deal with all future traffic. I just wanted to apologize to all the users and visitors who had to deal with the crashes and slow loading today. Its been a fantastically stressful day and I feel terrible for all those who ever affected. I hope you give us another chance, and I promise that your experience from here on will be much improved.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. My sister has a site which had gotten a mention on Daily Candy in February and her site had crashed the same day as well. So yes, I knew what was about to happen, and yes, I under estimated it. My mistake. It won’t happen again.

Thanks again and trade friendly.

Stephen

As you are aware, Commuto has only launched recently and while still in beta has had a few development bugs.  We have been working on fixing them as quickly as possible and hopefully you haven’t been affected by any.  As a thank you for giving us your time and patience we would like to announce our first promotion.

Commuto will be giving away a USD $250.00 gift card from Amazon.com to one of our members.  This is a random draw, but only those who are active will be included in our draw.  So please participate in your communities, add items to trade and see what’s out there for you to get.  Oh, and please invite your friends, neighbours and colleagues.  The more members we have the better the trade options are for everyone.

We’ll announce the winner on May 2^nd in our News Page.

As well, we are working on adding more options to our site that will make your experience much more interactive and enjoyable.  Stay tuned for updates.

Thanks and Trade Friendly,
Stephen

It finally happened. We got our first piece, or pieces, of publicity. I was checking our user count last night and saw a massive spike (for us its massive) of 76 new users. I immediately went to Google Analytics, one of my all time favourite website tools, to see where the traffic came from. Its incredible how useful Analytics is. Some days I spend hours just seeing where the traffic is coming from, looking at graphs, figures, stats and links. For a visual person like myself, this is heaven-sent.

The first mentions are below. They are from Trendcentral and FashionClub. I was actually very familiar with Trendcentral as is on my regular rotation of sites I read every morning, and I’m now familiar with FashionClub as well, which my sister would love. Thanks to both for mentioning such a young start-up.

The links to the articles:

http://trendcentral.com/Webapps/App/SnapShots/Article.aspx?ArticleId=7335

http://blogs.fashionclub.com/my_weblog/ecofriendly/index.html

Thanks again,

Stephen

I suppose the most often asked question by online businesses is how to advertise online for free or for very cheap and have it be effective. This is something I’m still trying to figure out. Our service is free, and I do believe it has great value to our users so of course I hope it grows by the oldest and cheapest form of advertising, word of mouth. Word of mouth is actually the most important method of advertising for us not because it’s the cheapest, but because the whole concept of Commuto is building communities and the only way to build them is by inviting your friends, neighbours and co-workers.

For Commuto, our advertising has to be contained and focused. City by city, school by school, office by office. If we scatter out too much we may get the users, but it will seem bare to those that do join, and I suppose that ends up being the most serious issue, how do we keep it interesting while not providing users any content. We have had users join from Arizona, Fairbanks, Alaska, Toronto and many other cities, but more often than not they are the only people in their city who have joined so far. I suppose all social sites have this issue initially so we’ll just have to wait for the site to populate and hope that those who joined in the beginning will be there later on as well.

One effective means of advertising I found yesterday was in the classified section on forums. I spend $1 to advertise for 2 weeks and we got 10 new users on the first day. I can’t be certain that all the users came due to this ad, but seeing as I haven’t advertised anywhere else yet, I am quite certain that at least 6-8 of those users are due to this ad. That’s a remarkably effective use of money but I doubt the return on investment would always be that high otherwise I would take a loan today for a mass classified advertising campaign.

Link exchange programs seem like a thing of the past. Google won’t allow them and that’s the kiss of death right there. So I’m left with personally finding sites to exchange traffic with, but currently we don’t have much traffic to offer. There is always a catch somewhere.

We are working on some big ad campaigns and partnerships with some larger companies which I can’t really discuss until its done, but for now I need to find other ways to get the word out. “If you build it they will come”…not if they’ve never heard of it. It’s time to get the word out.

If you have any ideas to share, please feel free to email me at sarbib@commuto.com.

Thanks and trade friendly.

Stephen