What do you do after successfully going into public beta? Well, you party a little, you sleep a little, and maybe take a peek or two at what the press says (Wired, Associated Press (via Washington Post), Xconomy, Gamasutra, etc). My favorite bits from the last week:

from Wired: “When we won our first track after performing well in a DJ game, we were thrilled even before we heard it. This is an intriguing way to get people excited about music, because it encourages active listening.”

from a personal blog: “The final takeaway that Loudcrowd leaves in your memory, is that there’s a party going on at the site, whether you are there or not, and if you want a little.. take a visit. That’s a powerful feeling to have after just using a site once.”

But before we get too caught up in all the positive hooplah, it’s time to remember that this is essentially the starting line. Sure, there’s another game coming in a month, and new playlists that will go up regularly, but there are also huge sections of the site we have yet to put online. How do we add group coordinated play? How do we take advantage of how much you guys seem to love stamps? How can we give users more control of the experience? How should we manage when there are multiple playlists at the same time? How can we expand the music selection but maintain our vibe? And how do we continue to add all the depth we have planned while making it at least 50% easier to understand for new users?

Just glad to have you all along for the journey.

Its been a crazy few weeks here at Loudcrowd …we’ve been building up our private beta for eight months, and we’re right about to release!  I for one have been zonked getting together our new playlists-can’t say who just yet, but trust that they’ll be featuring a slew of new tracks and rarities. It’s going to be a few more days of burning the midnight oil, but then off to South by Southwest to sweat it out and party down.

A bunch of Loudcrowders will be down in Austin to show off our new improved site, so naturally we are throwing a killer party We’ll be celebrating our release with the Rock You Shamrock party- headlined by Kid Sister, Datarock, and Hey Champ, 3/17 at the Speakeasy.

We’ve got some VIP passes to give out, so send an email to sxsw@loudcrowd.com that you’re coming to the event, and we’ll enter your name into the drawing.

Here’s our full schedule for those lucky enough to be joining the SXSW festivities:

3/13-3/21 Play Loudcrowd in the hallways of the Austin convention center, come see us near the ScreenBurn arcade
3/13-3/21 Hang out with us at the PureVolume house. every. night.
3/17 Our CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, speaks on the topic “Are Games the Next iTunes?” – 10am (seriously, you can do it then go back to bed)
3/17 Party with Loudcrowd at the Speakeasy

Come say hello if you’re there!

—Fucci

A look behind the scenes! Here you see Josh Hubball (VP of BD for Conduit Labs), Michael Dutcher (general manager of Dim Mak) and Nabeel Hyatt (founder / CEO of Conduit). They’re in the offices for Dim Mak. But you could probably guess that by looking at that DJ stand, covered in their distinctive logo. (I like how the low ceiling makes Josh look like a giant. Dude is tall, but he’s not Kobe.)

In preparation for Loudcrowd’s release — you know, beyond beta — Josh and Nabeel traveled to L.A. and San Francisco last week to hang with various music industry/ gaming/ web 2.0 bigwigs. Nabeel writes: “We had a great conversation with Dim Mak about lots of things we can do together, and left fully loaded with T-shirts and CDs.”

What does this mean for you, aside from a reason to be jealous of some people you probably don’t know? It just means there will be a wealth of awesome music for the game from the get-go. And that things will only get awesomer for Loudcrowd from then on. Just you wait! So, now that you know this, you can rest and enjoy the remainder of your President’s Day… Like, you can see what’s on TV during the daytime. Or, that IKEA sale looks pretty awesome! Me? I’m going back to bed.

—DJ Yeti

We’re extremely proud to congratulate one of our newest employees, Seth Sivak, for his work on Winds of Orbis, which was recently awarded as a winner of the Independent Games Festival 2009 Student Showcase. Winds of Orbis features ground-breaking use of the Nintendo Wii-mote and floor pads to promote more physically active play. See more (including a video of the game in action) here.

We here at Conduit love seeing games that explore new frontiers, so we’re thrilled to have Seth become part of the team as our newest Gameplay Engineer. (Stay tuned to see his newest creations on loudcrowd.com!)

How’s the second game look?

I’m officially very excited about getting all the stuff we’ve been hacking away at out for you guys to start playing with. This past week we invited some of our most passionate private beta users, as well as a handful of folks who have never used the site, to come by the Conduit HQ and give some feedback on the latest set of changes that are about to go live. Or, as we like to call it, the “pizza test.”

One of the first surprises was the extent to which folks who have been playing Loudcrowd a lot have figured out every nuance of the scoring and mechanics, thanks for caring! Then we got down to testing the entirely new site flow that we have been planning to do as soon as we launched our second activity. We took the requisite hits for a few UI inconsistecies and bugs that we have since worked out, but the best news of the evening was the unanimous thumbs up for the next game to hit Loudcrowd. We are pulling a few more late nights than I would like getting this next release out, but I’ve got the suspicion it’s worth it.

We had Governor Deval Patrick in our offices on Friday playing a little Loudcrowd and talking startups. In case this becomes a trend, we’ve decided to start a Facebook group called, “Politicians playing Loudcrowd.” Hey, you never know.

You’ll be happy to hear that the Governor, besides being all buddy buddy with the new President, also does fairly well at dancing for random college kids online.

For all of you in the private Beta, we’ve got an update that will make the perfect stocking stuffer to fill your long winter days. So come on by and check it out!

Tracks Page and dB

With this release, you can now collect songs that you can play for everyone to hear, it’s our jukebox for everyone.  As long as a Guest DJ isn’t currently playing, you can queue up your song and include a shout out which will show up at the top of the page in the “now spinning” area. These tracks will drop as sweet loot from the dance game and you can make the request from the new “tracks” page.  You’ll have to spend some dB to make the song request, but you can build up plenty of it by playing.

Performance Improvements… Seriously

We’ve done some work on performance in the past, but this time around we went a little crazy re-doing much of the front end of Loudcrowd.  We started with a complete retool of our site to take better advantage of the features Django has to offer.  This should elminate some weird behaviour that happened from time to time on the old version.  We also tore Flash a new one and drastically increased perfomance in the dance game, which includes a massive reduction to the memory footprint.  Don’t believe me? Look at this graph!

As an added bonus, we’ve added a sweet trippy effect to the dance floor (see screenshot at the top of this post).  Get into the groove enough and you can see it for yourself.

Invites

Have some friends that want to get into the Beta? Now you can earn invites and send up to 5 at a time to your friends using Facebook. Now when you say, “I know a guy who can get you into the club,” you’ll be talking about yourself!

The updates are coming fast and furious now. First, great to see so many of you turn up for the A/V Club playlist, we’ll have new playlists at least every week now, so drop back by. There are a bunch of new updates, including the often requested Closets for your clothes. Below are the biggest, let us know what you think.

Introducing the Closet

We know that in the past you’ve had a painful moment where you have make a difficult clothing decision, like whether to say keep your Pumpkin Head or scrap it for a sweet new A.V. Club headband, and we want to put an end to the dilemma. Why not keep them both?  Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you – the Closet!  Now you can store up to 20 items to mix and match as you please.  Only downside is now you have no excuse for uncoordinated outfits. Also, this means you can finally remove that zombie head you’ve been wearing the last few weeks.

Profile Support

Met someone on the dance floor that you want to meet up with again? Click the Fan icon from their mini-profile (available from private chat in the Dance game) or cruise over to their full profile for some extra info like a link to their homepage or even when they are most likely to be playing.  Click the start to become a Fan of someone, so you can check-up on people whenever you want, even if they are offline.

Performance Tweaks and Misc

The Dance game has recieved a few more performance tweaks and some UI retooling.  It should run better on lower end machines now and will hopefully be a lot easier for new people to get the hang of.

We’ve spruced things up a bit as well all over the site.  Shinier buttons, more flair, a ton of new pre-generated whispers.

We can probably all agree that T-Pain says it best in Kanye West’s “The Good Life”:

Is the good life better than the life I lived
When I thought that I was gonna go crazy
And now my grandmamma ain’t the only girl calling me baby
And if you feeling’ me now then put your hands up in the sky
And let me hear you say hey, hey, hey, ooh
I’m good

It’s in that same spirit that the guys from Conduit Labs will be gathering at The Good Life on 28 Kingston St. (near the Downtown Crossing T stop) on Election Night, Tuesday, November 4th.

If you’re in the Boston area come join us on the second floor in the vodka lounge at 7pm where we’ll be getting our drink on to some televised election returns.

With any luck the networks will call this race when west coast polls close at 11pm, and we’ll be able to look back at these last eight years of thinking we were gonna go crazy and just say right along with T-Pain: Hey, ooh, we’re good.

New update for you guys hanging out at Loudcrowd. There are some obvious things that you’ll notice right off the bat and some behind the scenes stuff that we’re really excited about too. It’s not ready for everyone yet, but if you’re in the Beta read on about the new stuff below.

New Music and Guest DJ Support

First off, we’ve added some great new tunes (if we do say so ourselves) and we have a whole bunch more that we are just about ready to unleash.

We’ve also started getting the site ready to host what we’ve been calling “Guest DJs”.  In the a couple weeks you will be able to login and dance to hand crafted, limited-play music lists and win special exclusive loot to commerorate the occasion!  More details will come as we get closer to our first Guest DJ appearence.  But basically – if you like things that are awesome, you will love these.

Social stuff – New Start Page and Whispers

Next time you log in to Loudcrowd, you’ll be greeted by our fancy new start page.  This is a great place to catch up on the latest happenings in Loudcrowd and will evolve over time.

You’ve asked for greater chat support, so for this release we added the ability to continue whispering outside of the dance game. Now you can pop out the whisper dialog from private chat, and continue your secret whispery conversation on the feed (that vertical bar on the left of the screen where all the song info pops up).

Technology! – EC2 /Multiserver Support

The internet is a pretty wild place with all sorts of magical things, like Amazon EC2. You can create virtual servers on the fly for however long you need them, for as long or as short as you like. Freedom! Getting all of our systems up and running EC2 took a lot of work but has enabled us to be able to handle a huge range of server load, have test environments that are exactly the same as our live ones, and save a fair amount of cash on operating costs – so we’ll have more funds to spend on sweet new features… and maybe also a few burritos. We gotta eat sometime!

Misc

Also, notice the groundbreaking new ability to adjust volume. There are also some new sounds in the dance game,  and a few performance tweaks. More coming soon, and your ideas are always welcome at GS.