Today we gave away our first MacBook Pro to @brmurray.  A few things to note about the giveaway.

  1. The giveaway is *random* – this means that anyone that entered can win, as long as they follow the rules, no matter how new the account is (welcome to those of you new to Twitter) or how many followers a person has.
  2. Valid entries for today’s Mac giveaway came from when we launched the giveaway (Nov 25) to Dec 3 midnight GMT (5pm AZ / 7pm EST).
  3. The people that have won are all *real* people.  And they are not employees or family members of employees or associates of br.st or Brinkster.
  4. The parent company of br.st is Brinkster Communications Corporation, a 10 yr old established company.
  5. We set the giveaway to be random, and when it is random you can’t control who wins (as long as they follow the rules).

With that said, here are the things that were fixed or added to br.st today.

  1. There is a countdown by the giveaway entry buttons that tells you when the day’s entries reset (reload the page to refresh this).
  2. There is now a notice telling you if you are following @brdotst on Twitter on the right side bar (you need to do this to win).
  3. We changed the front page when you are not logged in. What do you think?
  4. The popup when you click on a twitter user name has been enhanced a lot.  There is also a follow button on it now – so that you can now click on someone and easily follow them.
  5. Google maps were not showing up correctly.  The link syntax can be maps.google.com/? or maps.google.com/maps? – this now works.
  6. Youtube videos were not showing if they were not behind a short link – this now works as well.
  7. Minor alignment change to left align page title for shortened br.st links when they were expanded from a tweet.

What are we still working on right now?

  1. Updating following, followers, lists and more – more frequently – like # of tweets each time you tweet.
  2. Auto-refresh.
  3. Br.st links are showing an error when you try to post them to Facebook, Tweetmeme and probably other places.
  4. Adding the “Feedback” tab to the side of the website to link to http://help.br.st.

We hope to have those 3 things fixed for you early next week.  Check out our Get Satisfaction site : http://help.br.st and comment or vote for things you want to see us add/change.

Thanks for using br.st and telling people about it!  We really appreciate it.

Jared (@JaredStauffer)