Challenges are back… now with VOTING!

Hey 12ers,

Jacob here — It’s not often that you hear from me on the blog, but I wanted to go through some of the new features we launched today and Sol/Beach are not at their computers 😉

We’re excited to re-launch challenges.. we know a lot of you have been missing them. The main difference now is that YOU get to vote on who you think should win everyday! Any time you record a response to the challenge, that video will have a little vote box next to it anywhere it appears on the site. Other 12ers can then click on the “vote” button and give you 1-3 votes, depending on how much they liked the video.

Here’s the catch – you can only give out 3 votes per day. You can give all three to one video or spread it out evenly and give 1 point to 3 different videos – It’s up to you. You can always go back and change your votes too if you see something later on in the day that kicks total ass – just go back to the video you voted on before and it will let you set your vote back down to zero or change it to something else.

At the end of the day (midnight PST), the voting for that day’s challenge will stop and a winner will be assigned based on your votes. You can only vote for the current day’s challenge, but the number of votes will be visible after voting closes.

In addition, we’ve made some other minor improvements to the challenge system:

• New challenge bar that appears at the top of your home page
• Responding to the challenge no longer requires a re-load of the page – just click “respond” and go!
• We’ve now got a leaderboard for the challenges if you want to see who’s winning throughout the day.
• Challenges can now be sent via your mobile phone. Just make the subject of your MMS message “challenge” and we’ll do the rest.
• You’ll also be able to see the daily challenge question and submit responses from your iPhone with an update that we’ll be releasing later this week.

Sol wants me to mention that “This is all in good fun” and “There’s no need to get competitive”…. yet.

That’s it! As always, let us know if you notice any bugs and feel free to send feedback our way (I’m @jakey12 on Twitter)

So.. what are you waiting for? Go answer the challenge and vote for your favorites!