Why Our Lists Go To 11

What we use on our site is very special, because as you can see the numbers all go to 11. Look, right across the board - eleven (on music pages), eleven (on tags), eleven (on people)

Most lists on sites go up to 10. Does that mean Qloud’s any better?

Well, it’s 1 better isn’t it?

It’s not 10. You see, most blokes would be building a list of search results would go to 10 and they’d put all their lists at 10. All the way to the max at 10. Every page, 10, 10, 10 all over. Where can they go from there? Nowhere!

Exactly.

What we do, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do - 1 more!

People might ask, why don’t we make 10 our default and have that be the top number and have it be the max?

Again - These go to 11!

(Nigel Tufnel also does a good explanation here)

9/22 Service Update

Another update of the service was released today and with it some exciting new features…

• An updated iTunes 7 plugin.  iTunes 7 caused some initial problems for us.  Now, if you’re using iTunes 7, this new plugin has a button to allow you to go in and out of the Qloud view.  You’ll find it in the upper right corner by the “views.” It also correctly tracks plays and ratings.  It’s still new so let us know if you have any trouble with it.
• We now have a Trackfix feature.  When you were playing and tagging your tracks, we don’t always understand what the tracks are.  Now you can go in and tell us what the tracks are (and earn points in the process).  If you’re logged in, just go here to check it out: qloud.com/track_fix.php
• We’ve also received feedback that many of you want to find tracks from people like you and most of your refinements to search are simply placing items in the search so the tracks results are from people similar to you.  Because we all know that songs tagged “dance” from men over the age of 35 are much different than tracks tagged “dance” from women under the age of 22.  There’s now a button in the refine results where you can with one click filter the tracks to be from “people like you.”  The first time you click it, it’ll ask what attributes of “you” you want to use. This could be age, location, gender, or point level.
• New How To Qloud Tutorial. Still now sure about how to use the site? There’s a new flash video tutorial here which will do a walkthrough on how Qloud can be used.  Give it a try.

Thanks again for all your feedback and keep it coming…

Qloud Points

What are Qloud Points, anyway?
Qloud uses the power of community to enable you to find exactly the tunes you’re looking for. We also realize that this community can’t build itself, in fact, it’s you who’s building it! We rely on our users to tag tracks, invite their friends, and things like that to help our community grow and be the best it can be, and we want to reward those of you who help us out the most. You’re participation in Qloud will be reflected in the growing number of Qloud Points you amass along the way.

What I can do with them?
Consider Qloud Points a reward; our gift to you for making our service better. We want to give you more than just a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment. Although self-esteem is great, we want to give you something even better, so in a short while you will be allowed to redeem your Qloud Points to get cool stuff, like iTunes downloads and iPods.

How can I earn Qloud Points?
It’s pretty easy: use Qloud! Downloading and using our iTunes or Songbird plug-ins will get you most of your points, but you can get a big boost by inviting a friend to join the community. You can do so by sending them to your own personal invite page (find the link to it from the invite button on the right side of the page). You can see how many points you’ll get for each action below. Obviously, you get fewer points for easier stuff like just simply listening to your music, but pretty much anything that helps out our community gets you Qloud Points.

Point Actions:

• Playing a track: 1 points
• Tagging a track: 10 points
• Rating a track: 7 points
• Inviting a user (who registers): 600 points
• Creating a channel: 10 points
• Receiving a rating a channel: 20 points (3 stars), 60 (4 stars), 100 (5 stars)
• Fixing a track: 5 points
• Voting for a video: 7 points
• Submitting a URL for a video: 50 points

So what’s all this about point levels?
Qloud’s point levels are an easy way to tell who’s using Qloud the most. The more points you earn, the higher your point level, all the way up to the most elite level, Zeus. All of Qloud levels are different types of Gods of the sky and each has different characteristics. See the breakdown below to see who earns what level; it’s set up so the majority of users fall in the first four categories and only the truly dedicated users achieve the level of Zeus.

Point levels (and links to their Wikipedia profile):

• Level 0: bottom 5% of users
• Nuit (Level 1): 25% of users
• Raiden (Level 2): 25% of users
• Thor (Level 3): 25% of users
• Shango (Level 4): 10% of users
• Zeus (Level 5): top 10% of all users

New Service Update

We just released a new update to the Qloud site. Some of the new fixes are:

• Points page. You can now see how you’re earning points and how many points you get for actions such as plays, tags, invites, etc. To check it out, go to “Quicklinks” which is located in the upper right corner of the page by your name. If you’re logged-in, clicking here will take you to your points page.
• Speed of page reloads has been greatly improved.
• The area below the text box which displays what is being searched for (we call this “the cauldron”) now displays the results in a sentence format which should be easier to read - making the results more obvious.
• There’s now a back button next to the search button. This will allow you to go back to their previus search. Our searches don’t refresh the web page at all and only change the results, so if you use the browser’s back button, it will take you all the way to the home Qloud page. Now, you can use the back button to avoid this.
• Many generic bugs and browser compatibility fixes

Coming soon will be an iTunes plugin fully compatible with iTunes7. Also, make sure to either IM on the side of this page or send us an email with suggestions and/or frustrations (feedback@qloud.com)

Sort Buttons

When you’re searching for music, tags or people on Qloud’s service, we’re going to find a lot of things for you that meet your criteria. We could just throw all that information at you and let you figure it out on your own, but instead we decided to let you sort through the data with efficiency.

For music, you can sort tracks by either how often they’re tagged or played or by how high they’ve been rated. While remaining in this sort, you can further customize results by organizing them by time (recently, past 30 days, or all time). For example, you can find a list of tracks by eighteen year old guys in L.A. and sort that by recently played, or you can change the sort to see what songs they played the most in the past 30 days, or change it again to check out what they’ve listened to the most ever. To try out the different sorts, click on the buttons to the top right of the list of tracks. They look like this:

Tags can’t be listened to or rated, so for tags, you can only sort by time. You can sort a list of tags by recently used, most used in 30 days, and most used all time.

For a list of users, you can sort them by both time and activity. The time sorts are like the other types - most recent, most in 30 days, and most all-time.  The two types of activities we use for sorting users are plays and tags.  So, you could search for users who have tagged the most Pearl Jam tracks, or you could search for the user that has played the most David Hasselhoff tunes.  User sorts look like this:

Friends, Channels and More…

We just rolled out an update of the service. A quick summary of the new items:

• Many people get most of their new music recommendations from their friends. Now you can easily keep track of what your friends are actually listening to and rating. If you go to another user’s profile page, just click “Add as Friend” and you can add a buddy. Doing so will allow you do searches based on your friends and see. Looking for a friend? Feel free to add me as your buddy (click here)
• We also added a Friends Page which lets you see quickly the top played, tagged and rated tracks from your friends. You can get there from the Quicklinks area in the upper right corner of the screen
• Sometimes there’s a search that returns a great list of results. You can now save each search result as a Channel. As new songs enter the channel, you can get email or RSS updates of these new tracks. This a great way to continuously find new music.
• Bugs, bugs and bugs. Some are large such as a better Artist page and the ability to play tracks. Others are smaller such as flickers happening in Safari. I’d like to thank you all your feedback. We found and squashed bugs we didn’t even know about.

Coming soon: updated version of the iTunes plugin that will be easier to install, smoother and much quicker.

If you’re not yet using the service and would like to, please put your email in on the home page (qloud.com)

For those of you using the service, please keep the feedback coming (feedback@qloud.com)

Organizing Your Library Using Tags

With the Qloud plugin, you can now organize your iTunes library using tags. I have a farily large library and often “lose” tracks because i can’t find them or forget their name.  For a while, i tried to use playlists to keep track of my music.  Nothing worked.

Over here at qloud, we build an ever better solution - the Qloud plugin for iTunes
Now, all you have to do it tag a track and you can find it when you need it.

You can get it now too.  How? Here are some easy steps:

1. Go to qloud.com and either login or join our private beta by entering your email
2. One logged in, go to our download page
   
3. Install the plugin for either iTunes or Songbird
4. In iTunes, Choose Qloud to be your visualizer from the visualizer menu (go to the visualizer menu at the top and select Qloud)
5. Click the Visualizer icon, which is the cosmic looking icon in the lower right of your itunes player (see image below)
6. Now you’re in the Qloud plugin. You can tag any track and browse your library by tags, so get started tagging!
7. Many features to help you accomplish all your tagging desires are on their way. Please let us know (by emailing us at feedback@qloud.com) if you have any suggestions or comments.