Hey everyone,
It’s been a busy summer for us. We were busy putting Utterz beta customer feedback into action. Our incredibly talented engineers were able to rapidly develop and release new features and functionality — faster than any development team I’ve worked with. An intense period of development started in the first week of June. Here is what we delivered over the summer:
• Our API, which is already being leveraged for a dozen projects, including partner product integrations into popular sites and services
• A user interface overhaul that eliminated confusing and crowded user preference menus
• Creating an utter is now much easier – both from the PC and the mobile phone
• We added features enabling easier sharing, connecting and communicating – things like direct messaging
• Video quality enhancements and better handling of letterbox formatted video

We’ve been quiet about these changes, but we are really appreciative of the supportive feedback from the Utterz beta customers — it kept us working through weekends all summer.

In the process of understanding how our customers value our service, we also learned that discussions need to be portable, participation needs to include mobile content creation and sharing, and our service needs to be present in all of the relevant social web ecosystems where people already have conversations. But we went further than examining these issues by re-examining our own customer usage, interviewing competitors’ customers and speaking at length with potential customers about their needs.

Starting today, you’ll see the two biggest R&D learnings reflected in our service. Those two learnings are:

1. There is a huge need for mobile group discussions. Overwhelmingly, social web users told us that conversations communities — dial-up, SMS, video, text, image-based — need to focus on enabling group discussions with mobile participation. Social web users were very critical of the current notions of groups — they told us that current group features in various social web services are inadequate, disconnected from the phone and poorly integrated with contacts, people search, and topical search. When asked, you told us the multi-modal interpersonal communications and content sharing functionality of Utterz inspired memorable conversations and fostered meaningful relationships. And, you asked us to bring more people into the conversation by turning a conversation into a group – a place where a topical discussion has a permanent home.

We took this to heart, as is reflected in the new tagline: Create, Connect, Share, Anywhere. More importantly, we have embarked on a process that we believe will redefine the common definition of Groups. We believe that a Group is not a “feature” for any social web or community site — rather, Groups are the best way to organize content and relationships. We encourage you to explore our version of Groups and give us feedback so that we stay on track throughout this critical growth phase.

2. Utterz has outgrown its original identity. The cow puns, mascot, etc., are loved by some of our earliest customers and employees. And, we’re forever grateful to those people for their enduring support and creativity. However, the Utterz identity was limited in scope and appeal, inhibited some new customer adoption and interfered with some key business discussions.

Today we unveil Utterli — a new name and a new identity that bridge our heritage with the rapid growth we’ve undergone in recent months and provide for the future business growth we can now begin to address. But, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new name is that, with Utterli, an “utter” is still a post, and members can continue to use meaningful references to “utterers” and “utts.”

Finally, I’d like to share a word or two about our recent growth rates. The Utterli userbase has more than tripled in the last two months thanks to a combination of product improvements and high-profile use cases, such as the American Red Cross, Representative Culberson’s controversial use of Utterz in Congress, and user-driven sports team communities, band communities and political events. People utilizing our service are creative and attracting audiences, and, in a lot of cases, new users are bringing with them their own communities. In terms of traffic to our properties (uniques, views), Utterli leaped ahead of mobile social community sites such as Plurk, Pownce, and Tumblr and is quickly gaining on Twitter. For this growth, we’re thankful to everyone using Utterz – we’re humbled by your appreciation, and inspired by your criticisms. The growth is nothing short of phenomenal, and we look forward another escalation in adoption and usage after today’s addition of Groups and the launch of new partnerships with well known consumer services.

On that last point, over the next few weeks, Utterli will announce new product initiatives created through partnerships with device companies, media management services, vertical media destinations and mass market consumer web services. And, new services will be brought to market through our web services API, where partners and independent developers alike are tapping our powerful, underlying group communications platform to expose fun and compelling services focused on mobile publishing, group MMS and media sharing.

We encourage you to continue to communicate your needs, thoughts and insights during this intense period of growth — your ideas and inputs are invaluable and always appreciated.

Thanks for your time and commitment to Utterli!

Aaron Burcell