the bragster blog

Hope you’re all enjoying the Bragster Olympiad and are inspired for a wicked summer full of dares and bragging. You’ve been asking for a lot of changes for a while now, and the team here has been working very hard to make them a reality. In a few months time, you’ll be able to sample the result when we release an upgrade of the site after summer.

So what will change? We’ve been following all of you closely and got a lot of feedback after launching dares earlier this year. You all seem to be crazy about dares as they are the majority of all new events created (as opposed to bets or polls). So we decided to give you more of the good stuff, and do some serious restructuring of the site’s functionality related to daring and showing off in general. The main goal is to reward our best users more, while enhancing the social experience for everyone.

1. We’re retiring bets and polls. As we have been growing organically, we’ve added new features really quickly. Some of them took off straight away, but we never really removed the less popular ones. We have now decided that we’re going to focus on dares and remove all bets and polls. We will also have a more consistent language and refer to Dares for all challenges and Brags for all pieces of evidence or other show-off material (like videos or pictures).

2. Turn on BragTV. The focus on the new site will be on what really matters: videos or pictures you want to show off to your friends and other bragsters. We’ll have a big Brag TV section that will host all those videos and pictures and make it easy for viewers to browse the best bits on Bragster.

3. Upload videos directly to Bragster. After the new upgrade, you’ll be able to upload your videos directly to Bragster, and we’ll play them in a higher resolution on a dedicated Brag page. You will also be able to embed them on other sites.

4. Two new dare types. On the current site you can only dare one person directly, but we’re working on the following three types of dares: (1) open dares, (2) personal dares, (3) dare a friend. An open dare enables you to challenge the whole Bragster community to do something the best, fastest, farthest, … e.g. “Who can down the most Tabasco shots”; a personal dare is a statement that you can do something yourself, e.g. “I bet I can down 10 Tabasco shots”; finally you can dare friends directly in the same way you already can on the current site, e.g. “I dare Bertrand to down 10 Tabasco shots”.

5. Bye-bye BragBucks, hello Bragging Rights! We’ve heard from you that BragBucks aren’t really the best way to reward real Bragsters. This is completely true: right now you can earn as many BragBucks by placing your bets on the right outcome, as the person actually completing the dare, which is why we’re replacing BragBucks with Bragging Rights. You will only earn Bragging Rights for Brags you uploaded yourself. How many Bragging Rights you’ll earn will mainly depend on how much people see your Brag, and how they rate it.

6. Thumbs up/down are out. Since we’ve retired BragBucks, we also decided to retire the rating system. Bragging Rights will also take the place of the rating system.

7. Join Groups and Teams. You’ll be able to create groups and teams, and we’re going to make search better, so it will be easier to find your friends. You can team up with your best friends or join your university group. To get you started, you’ll be able to import your contact list from your email address book.

That’s about it for now, we’ll keep you updated via our blog as and when we make some of the changes listed above. The look and feel of the site will also change, and we’ve even thrown in a new logo! The screenshot below should give you a bit of a flavour already.

If there is anything else you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to let us know by either leaving a comment on this post, contact us, or send me a personal message at wim @ bragster [dot] com.

Now get your Bragster on!

Bragster.com is pleased to announce the appointment of Wade McElwain as the new VP of Entertainment.

We didn’t really want to but he bragged that he could do a better job than the stuffed monkey we had already doing the job and we are a bragging website…so he’s hired.

Wade brings with him a wealth of knowledge which is applicable nowhere else except perhaps a prison yard. Which probably explains his tattoos; penchant for whispering in people’s ears and 8 year gap on his CV.

His educational experience particularly his diploma from ‘McHamburger University’ is of great value to bragster for as Wade says ‘it ain’t a happy meal without putting a prize in it. Then it’s just a crap meal! Isn’t it!! Isn’t it!!’ We here hope for as many prizes from him as possible.

Wade’s previous jobs included: Catching squirrels for rabies testing; CEO at AOL; being Britney Spears’ PR Manager; and once held the title of the Vicar of Cockfosters.

We look forward to Wade’s invaluable input for bragster’s content, although so far his best idea was to cut the cable on the elevator to get back at the guy on the 5th floor who sneezed on his jacket.

Please join us in welcoming Wade to the team but please remember not to look him right in the eyes as it heightens his paranoia and makes him stabby.

Welcome Wade!

The first Bragster party is now just a distant memory, but trust us when we say no one who attended will forget! Obviously we had to dare everyone to show up in their undies…

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Thanks to all of you who helped organizing!!

Finally some news from the bragster team after our week in Austin! Sorry for the radio silence while we were there; we tried to keep you updated via our Twitter account as that was more convenient given the bad internet connection out there. I’d like to think we’ve been too busy to write blog posts because we were attending panel after panel, but that was only during daytime. So what’s the excuse for evenings or early jetlag mornings? Well… I’ll let you take a guess on that one ;)

It’s been really great and the sessions were of a very high quality. There was something in it for everyone and while I’ve attended sessions about the art of self-branding, start-up management 2.0, how to keep teams who love their jobs motivated, the rest of the team attended sessions about design, marketing, community management, how to measure success, and many, many other topics. There was also a keynote from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook. The interview didn’t really teach us anything new apart from the fact they just launched in French, but it was still impressive to see how a 24 year old has accomplished such great things.

The weather has been great and it’s tough being back in rainy London… We’ll also miss our steaks and the local Shiner beer at some of the many parties we attended, such as Google, Gawker media, 16bits, the Great British Booze up and many others. Bertrand and myself have also been to a shooting range on Saturday to get the true Texas experience. Scary!

Have a look at Adam’s pictures on Flickr here.

Today we’re welcoming Chris as a new senior developer who’s gonna help out Peter and his team to get the site run even smoother than it already does. Chris is already a Ruby genius so will hit the ground running and and get you some cool new functionalities. He comes at a great time just after our round of funding and continued focus on the new dares.

Before I close off here, wanted to show you a recent video on the site that made my day yesterday. Gandy snorts one meter of chilli…

VICTORY IS SWEET indeed

The Bragster team is going to Texas on Friday to attend the SXSW conference in Austin. We’re very excited about learning some new stuff and also showcasing some of the things that we’ve been working on. Obviously we’re also there to have some fun after we worked pretty damn hard for the past year and a half. As these things go, it all started way back with a few too many drinks and me promising the team a trip to Las Vegas if and when we secured our next round of funding. People tend to remember such promises but fortunately they preferred to get something useful out of such a trip and so we decided to go to SXSW instead.

I personally look forward to some of the keynotes including one from Mark Zuckerberg and … sunshine! You will be able to follow updates on all the stuff we’re up to over there (and believe me when I say that we have BIG plans!) either here on our blog or why not follow us via our new Twitter identity