Could we set up a referral form where we could put in friend's emails who we think would love Skritter? If they sign up we could have extra coolness points on our eventual profiles or something.

Hey Nicki, actually that's something we're going to be working on in the next few weeks. We've actually had a number of people ask us about this, we know that a lot of our users have been exceptionally generous about recommending us to friends and family, but so far there hasn't been anything to reward them for being such a big part of our growth. We hope that will change in the next month.

Since we haven't settled exactly on the rewards system, did you have some thoughts on how you would like it work? For instance, what reward did you want? Should the both the referrer and the referree get that reward? We'd be interested to hear other's thoughts on this as well!

I think doing a benevolent act is its own reward. I don't see the need of external motivation for doing good, such as recommending Skritter.

I wouldn't mind getting my own Skritter time extended for recommending Skritter ;-).

Skritter sells by its own virtues. I feel bad about recommending things to close friends if it benefits me personally. Certainly give a small incentive to the new person signing on.

Skritter is so good and helpful that we have to promote it in order to spread its virtues.

Skritter founders are rewarding us everyday with the amazing improvements and great work.

Working on extending our current subscriptions would be more than acceptable. I agree with what 沈唯達 says, but you are still a business and it is a great way to promote yourselves :P

Actually I wouldn't be so concerned about a reward system, but being able to send my comments on a nice Skritter template would be nice.

Thanks for giving this some thoughts guys! Byzanti, you hit on the main reason why we're trying to be cautious with referrals. We don't want to muddying the waters of true altruism by putting a price on it and certainly not a price that is insulting to otherwise altruistic recommenders. On the other hand, we do want to encourage spreading the news. Hmmmm. I've been doing some research, and some companies just give rewards to the new member, not the referring member as a way to steer clear of negative incentives. Do you think that would suit you?

Lennier, every time I look at your avatar it reminds me of being a kid when I used to watch star wars once a day. Whoa. :)

Actually, here's another idea to promote Skritter: You guys could create a simple status widget that we could put on our websites/blogs - something like "In the last x days, I learned y Chinese/Japanese characters using Skritter. And you can too!" or maybe displaying a little graph. Of course, it would have to be optional (to be enabled in the settings) and you'd need to implement some clever caching so that your servers are not too strained by generating those status graphics.

re: status widget. I have the progress/reminder message posted to twitter every week; that one could perhaps include a link to skritter.com instead of just having the name of the site?

We'll make badges that display your progress, sure. It is on the list.

沈唯達: Could do that, but would have to cut some info for it to fit. Is there anything not particularly useful that could go?