Finally! We're in the final phase before we publish our new feature set, called "The PokerStrategy.com Community".

From our office, the final version with live data is already available, and our staff already fills up their profiles, founds groups – and of course still finds some glitches and minor bugs that need to be exterminated.

For the first time, it really feels "good", because all those non-final version with their usability and performance problems tend to make you worried about the final result. Will it be good? Will the community accept will? Or will they say: "bah, what a crap! You'd rather have done something else!"?

Now, I'm confident that this is just the right thing. Finally, we're able to send personal messages and chat with our friends in the community. We can have groups for common interests – and they are not even a competition for our allmighty forums, but an additive: groups can link to certain forums, making sure the new "community" and the forums interact well.

Additionally, we're currently fine-tuning the last details of our christmas promotions: I hope you'll all be happy with our small presents. If you want to say "thanks", do it by filling up your profile and bring a little life into the new features upon release ;) 

Yesterday I had the chance to play Paintball for the first time in my life. Ten guys & girls from our company battled it out internally and also against some other teams that were around.

Even though – as most of the time I'm too lazy don't have the time for sports because I work so much – I got severe muscle ache, it was really great fun. Can just suggest to try it to anyone. And it doesn't hurt too much: even if your finger (without glove) gets hit directly twice, it does not fall off.

I have to admit that I was not really amongst the best of us. My only great action was an artistic offensive run to catch the flag in a rush, but then we noticed the opposite team didn't hear the starting signal. And so I was wasted for no reason.

As there are no automated statistics (it's no laser game), I can't be sure. But I'd guess that our two top guys were Dami (responsible for the whole product development and our partner sites) and Marcus (our puppet master for economic strings). But of course Georgs/bahmrockks girfriend gets my respect as well for her great performance at a last 1on1 against a seemingly experienced paintballer. They were the last after an intense 6 minute 8on8 deatchmatch in the tourney range.

The downside of course is that I've got to catch up with some reports today so you all won't have to suffer from our spare-time activities, but it's a great sunday in the office and the coffee tastes great. So I wish you all an enjoyable sunday (and maybe also a productive one, e.g. at the poker tables?)! Read you soon.

Soon? Well, I won't give a precise date, because it always has been a bad omen. So just: soon we will launch our community feature module.

Yesterday we made our internal launch, meaning that all our community managers and web developers can now actively use and test the system to find last bugs and check everything.

We hope that you will enjoy the possibility to communicate with your friends on PokerStrategy.com through chat and personal messages. We also hope that you tell a little more about yourself: your interests, your favourite gametype, maybe a picture.

Why? Because in the end, PokerStrategy.com is just you: without every single member, our community and poker school would be none.

Through this new feature package we hope to give our users the relevance they ought to have! 

By the way: after finishing that first release, we will immediately switch to re-designing the home page, the navigation and the video section - followed by relaunches of all important sections of our site.

We've got a busy winter ahead of us - but in the end, spring 2009 will bear a by then complete rebirth of our website! 

I remember it well when we decided to start development of the PokerStrategy.com Elephant back in late 2007. Althought today it seems like a natural decision, we were hesitant to do so at first.

For one, there already was a decent product – PokerTracker – which we back then offered to all our members that successfully gathered 2,000 StrategyPoints. Secondly, we did make the experience that offering a really good software was not easy: besides interesting, valuable features you always have to make sure the quality is good. A software that crashes or is hard to handle / hard to install will not be a product welcomed by the community.

But still, there were some reasons to try: if we had development under our control, we could easier implement the community's favourite features – whereas convincing an indepentend partner to do so was really hard, even though we were their biggest customers.

Additionally, with a software of our own, we can make sure people get their licenses quick and get a long-term support. So its easier for our members and less risk for us all.

So we tried. And if I look at the Elephant today, we succeeded. After less than a year of development, it is a full-fledged tool with less and less weaknesses. I'm very much convinced it will be the #1 tool in all important areas in 2009.

But of course not everything is too bright: to make sure we get the right amount of feedback to fuel our development and bug removal process, we decided to make an early alpha release. The following months were of course still full of not-working features, performance problems and annoying bugs. And as most people don't have too much time, they rightfully don't want to give a piece of software more than one or two chances. If it annoys them with bugs the first time they try to use it, they don't like it. And this opinion stays.

So today, we have a much better product – but still a large bunch of members that had too bad experiences with the Elephant to try it again. To us, that means double effort: to convince them, we need to make the Elephant so good that new people using it talk in the highest tones of it. Only if we convince those using the programme, we will be able to get back the users lost to bugs. 

Hundreds of freelancers work for PokerStrategy.com today. Each of them is an important part – they especially stand for the vivid side of our site, doing not only videos and articles, but interactive coachings, hand ratings, interviews and so on.

All of these freelancers should get their fair share of appreciation, and usually they do: people give feedback, praise their work. Basically, this feedback is the best measure for the quality of their work. Because of that, we are currently in the first stages of a plan that would give a little power to our users.

The idea is to make our community vote and give the best authors of the content pieces a premium. Why? Because the quality could improve! Doing great work, one could get not only extra attention and praise, but also a few extra bucks. And coming from the hearts of the community, these extra bucks would even feel better.

What do you think about empowering our users to rate and evaluate authors, coaches and video producers? A chance? A risk? Too complicated?

Last, but not least, I want to answer a question by BigStack83 in the comments: the title of this blog entry holds a good hint to our next partner!