Today we are releasing Grupthink v3.5! One of the goals of this release was to simplify the visual experience and make topics easier to find and explore. We’ve also improved many of the core features and added some nice maps for both users and admins.

Downtime will commence in a few minutes from posting, and we expect it to last a couple hours. I will keep you posted here and in our Twitter feed of any changes and updates.

Check out these notable improvements:

• Simplified and re-worked UI based on user feedback.
• Many improvements to your topic feed on your personal home page
  • Default topic feed now includes all topics you can read, including private group topics.
  • Layout changed to match other topic lists throughout Grupthink
  • Quicker access to your groups list at the top of your home page when logged in
  • Your home page will remember the last topic feed and format you used.
• New friend activity feed on your home page
• Topic history reels: Updated style and functionality
• Updated vote button styling
• New styling for all user-submitted images allows us to discontinue using 24-bit (large) PNG’s
• Topic page layout improvements
  • Content has been organized so all the important information is easier to find and access.
  • Removed placeholder images on topics and answers where an image was not included to limit visual clutter.
  • Decreased the number of visible options to reduce confusion.
• Topic Maps: Click “Report” on the topic pages to see a map of voter distribution and other info.
• Topic list (/top/) navigation improved and made to be consistent with other topic lists.
• Increased allowed comment editing time to 10 minutes.
• Many other minor updates.

Grupthink Pro Updates:

• Facebook Connect changes
  • Simplified the process for enabling Facebook Connect and content sharing with Facebook
  • Updated our code to resolve issues with changes to the Facebook Connect API
• Topic & Answer Vote Maps: Click “Report” on topic pages to see maps of voter distribution. If you are a privileged member or admin, you can use the select menu to reveal voting maps for specific answers and compare results between them.
• Admin home page updated:
  • Revamped the design and display of the page.
  • Now includes a global site activity feed so you can see, at a glance, everything that’s been happening.

Grupthink Blends Forums and Polling for More Productive Web Discussion

September 16, 2009 – Grupthink, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of its next-generation web discussion platform, making group conversations more engaging and productive. Grupthink, available at http://www.grupthinkpowered.com/, is a web service that makes it easy and affordable for companies and organizations of any size to continuously learn from their customers via their own Grupthink-powered feedback community.

“Discussion forums are a must-have for most customer-facing web properties, but they tend to become noisy and chaotic, making it difficult to take the pulse of the community at large,” said Steven Sundheim, founder and CEO of Grupthink. “Grupthink is a way to conduct more productive and engaging online discussions where community consensus is automatically and continuously revealed.”

As more companies seek ways to adopt open innovation, they use multiple online tools to tap into customer insights, manually monitoring and aggregating feedback into useful data. Grupthink delivers many benefits of these tools in a single survey community platform, saving companies time and money.

Grupthink is a hosted web service, so setup happens in minutes without any software to install. Optional add-ons geared toward consumer research and community management can also be attached to each plan.

Grupthink can work as a visually and technically integrated piece of an existing online community, as well as a standalone web property, making it unique among feedback community solutions. The platform has comprehensive community and content management tools built-in, and uses a unique voting system involving ranked votes and “time traveling” to see how opinions change over time in a single discussion.

Grupthink clients range from individuals with small discussion groups to large companies conducting consumer research. The platform is currently used for private online focus groups, gaming forums, reader comments and discussion, and standalone web properties.

Grupthink is available today as a hosted, subscription-based service to any organization at http://www.grupthinkpowered.com. A 30-day free trial is available and pricing starts at just $24.99 per month.

Grupthink, Inc was founded in 2006 and is based in Missoula, Montana.

Today we unveiled grupthinkpowered.com! This is the storefront and home page for the Grupthink platform. We’ll be announcing via press releases tomorrow, but I wanted to give you the inside scoop!

At Grupthinkpowered, you can start your own, branded feedback communities based on the Grupthink platform. I encourage you to do so! Afterall, you can try it out for 30 days free!

Why create a Grupthink-powered community? Grupthink makes group discussion more fun, productive, and transparent. There are all kinds of ways to use Grupthink, including simple feedback forums for your website, private online focus groups, and large public communities. For more, check out http://www.grupthinkpowered.com/uses/.

- Steven

A few fixes and tweak are being released today:

• Infinite redirect fixed if answer or topic was just a special character
• Better handling for special characters in AJAX. This fixes the problem with the Euro symbol and other characters.
• Grupthink Administrative:Style updates
• Grupthink Administrative: Ballot images can be generated based on color choices
• Optimized and improved tabs on topic pages and feed
• Various small fixes

This morning we released an update which includes the following:

Grupthink.com

• RSS feeds now supported for all topic lists (Most popular, Busiest, etc..)
• Fixes issue where topic end date could not be removed
• Fixes issue where topic edits by admins were credited to the original authors instead

Grupthink Pro

• WYSIWYG Editing for custom pages, news, and front page message
• Other minor fixes

Today we are releasing Grupthink v3.3! I’ll update this post as soon as the upgrade is completed. Upgrade complete!

Check out these notable improvements:

• Friends with Facebook Connect will have the Facebook Icon on their picture.
• Tweet topics! Just use the little Twitter icon on each topic page.
• Easy unsubscribe option now available in email notifications
• Major performance improvements.
• History “miniquilts” now have improved mouseover effect. Dragging over the pointer no longer switches focus
• Fixed issue where some history “miniquilts” had missing lines and links
• Various other bug fixes & enhancements

Grupthink Pro Updates:

• “Quick Start Checklist” for new admins
• New Report: highest and lowest rated content
• Themes: Choose from 4 styles. More to come…
• New “Page background image” upload option in style management.
• “Top” custom Page Add-in now displays above all content, including navigation to support wide ads.
• Simplified style management options
• WYSIWIG Editor for front page, custom pages, and news articles. (coming this week)
• Other fixes & enhancements

Today at around 3pm Mountain, we’ll be deploying version 3.3! Downtime should be minimal.

An article was recently published in the Missoulian about Grupthink Pro:

For all its usefulness, the Internet can be overwhelming.

Sure, there’s a lot of information – sometimes too much – but how do you trust the information you find is accurate and timely?

How do you harness that knowledge to become better informed, improve your workplace, strengthen your business and tackle pressing issues that affect your decision-making challenges and successes?

More importantly, how do you get feedback that you can use?

The conundrum was compelling enough for Modwest, a Missoula Web-hosting business, to put its energies toward a solution.

Read on…

Tonight, June 25, at around 5pm Mountain we’ll be taking Grupthink sites down to run an update. We’re fixing an intermittent problem with ballots that is affecting some people on certain topics. This problem allows for an answer to be listed twice in the ballot, and then causes errors whenever the user tries to change the ballot rankings. Downtime is expected to be about one hour as we fix the root issue and run a script that fixes any affected ballots.

Update! I failed to mention that this update includes these improvements:

• Fixes “double answer” ballot bug.
• Changed link styles to use underline effect on hover instead of background color. This fixes a number of minor display annoyances with linked images.

Grupthink Pro:

• Fixed color of tab links in admin to use site colors instead of white.
• Improved some verbiage in the Facebook App tutorial and settings pages.
• “Reports” now shows on the admin home page.

Tonight we’re deploying an update around 5:30pm Mountain, which includes these changes:

• Fixes issue where html syndication widget affected non-widget link colors on the published page.
• Fixed “bouncing” friend lists in IE7.
• Replaced the missing “view all friends” link on member profile pages.
• Replaced your “History” on your home page with the new “mini-quilt” version.
• Added Facebook icon to welcome mesage in header, personal home page, and public profile page, if your account is linked to Facebook.

Thanks for reporting bugs!