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.

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!

Right – in the past, communication with each other was not as easy as it could be on PokerStrategy.com. Private Messages have been gone so long that most people didn't ever see them. But this is about to change!

I will first write a few things about the new forum, as Gofa asked me for in the comments.

One of the most important things that will be possible is recombinding different parts of the forum for different overviews. That will make it possible to use e.g. the English VIP forums and the high-stakes hand rating forums also for smaller communities that do not have enough high-status users yet to fuel these on their own. This might also bring some of the now strongly seperated language communities of ours closer together. There will be a lot of synergies, as a kind of "international" forum will mean that there is plenty of reason to get you even better and more hand judge.

Other features include:

• Restrictable moderator status on certain boards including avatar (so a "small talk" moderator won't look like a moderator in a strategy board
• Read-only status as a soft punishment for spammers / flamers
• Improved optics & layout
• More custom status groups like "video producers"
• Customizable user titles to make a better distinction between certain staff functions
• Ability to feed out individual data streams like "my threads in hand rating forums" that can be included on home / strategy portals
• ...

Well, a lot of that stuff doesn't sound spectacular, and partly this is true: a lot of the current work flows into a more modular and performat system, so that the forum will be faster even for much larger user groups / post counts and new features will be easier to implement.

Second topic: our "social networking" features!

Work is in good progress there, and we should be done in September. Then, you will be able to connect with your friends at PokerStrategy.com and interact with them. You might ask: "What's the use of another social network?" – and that is a good question.

In fact, we do not understand these features as being a new social network on its own. We rather learn from the social networks and the things they invented to make the Internet richer and more communicative.

So you will have a buddy list not only in your profile, but also everywhere – implemented into a kind of top bar (see picture below). So no matter where you are on the site, you will be able to send quick messages to your buddies. That makes it much easier to discuss videos, strategy articles or news, especially if compared to "simple private messages" like you know them from forums.

Another big topic on social networks is data security. We will handle that very cautiously. For most data, it will be your choice whether you want to share it with your friends, with everyone, or no one. And for some data (like your street address or your surname) we do not even allow you that. Goal is to protect you from people abusing your personal data or gathering information on your without you noticing it.

There is much more to tell, but I'd rather stop here because I have some reports to finish for tomorrow. Otherwise, Stefan will get angry at me ;)

Enjoy the night!