Quizr Blog

Quizr is now open but closed. It goes into official closed beta mode today. That means it’s closed to the general public, but open to any interested parties (for now). You can sign up on quizr.com if you’d like early access.
So now would be a really good time to explain Quizr.

Quizr is a site I’ve been thinking about for the past 18 months (right around the time I registered quizr.com, funnily enough, in August ‘05), but didn’t have time to work on until a few months ago. The idea is to create a platform where people can make, take, and share quizzes, containing multichoice questions or free-form written questions.

Well, what’s new about this? Quizzes have been on the web for years, and some sites even let users make their own quizzes, just like Quizr. The difference is a bunch of new ideas and technologies that combine to make the experience more useful and compelling. I mean that not in a buzzwordy way, but in a quite genuine way - whether used for education, language learning, fun, whatever, the experience is much more productive and enjoyable with these new Web 2.0 concepts at our disposal. To wit:

• Ajax - As you may know, I’m a big fan of Ajax. Ajax makes quizzes easier to create, edit, and take. Most importantly, you can answer a question and get a result without waiting 10 seconds for the page to reload!
• Embedded multimedia - Thanks to the ubiquitous nature of Flash, we can now embed video and audio as easily as images. In fact, it’s oddly enough easier to embed massive videos than miniscule images … hot-linking images (placing images from an external site) is still a dicey topic, but embedding a video from youtube is trivial and encouraged by youtube themselves. Quizr leverages this and lets you place video onto questions with a simple <video> tag, MP3s and images can also be embedded.
• RSS/Atom Newsfeeds - Feeds can be used to keep people up to date with the latest quizzes and related activity.
• Tagging - The old tagcloud is a bit of a cliche by now, but
• Mashups and APIs- You can take quizzes at Quizr.com, but it’s my hope that you’ll soon be able to take quizzes elsewhere too. I’m looking forward to releasing an API soon, at least a basic one, because even early feedback suggests so many cool games and different ways to play around with quizzes, there’s no way known I’m gonna be the one making them all myself!