uTorrent Idea Bank Taps Into the Wisdom of the Swarm
The uTorrent team has added an idea bank to their website where users can vote for and suggest features that should be implemented in the BitTorrent client. A Linux version of uTorrent and the option to receive an email when a file has finished downloading are currently the most voted for ideas.
uTorrent is one of the most widely used BitTorrent applications. It is the client of choice for more than 50 million users worldwide and this number continues to rise alongside BitTorrent’s increasing popularity.
Over the years, uTorrent’s developers have received thousands of suggestions from users on how the client can be further improved. To streamline this process and to find out what the most wanted features and improvements are, the uTorrent team has launched an Idea Bank.
The Idea Bank is prominently featured on uTorrent’s website and allows users to submit and vote for ideas they want to see implemented. Users can vote for a maximum of 10 ideas, but are free to change their vote if a better suggestion comes along. Once an idea is completed, users will regain the vote they allocated to that suggestion.
With the Idea Bank uTorrent hopes to tap into the wisdom of the crowd (or swarm), which will hopefully lead to an even better product for the end user.
“We’ve actually wanted to do it for a while now and we’ve finally found resources to get it done,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak. “The point is to have a more structured way for users to contribute feature ideas and then vote on them – it is an attempt to engage the wisdom of crowds more directly.”
uTorrent Idea Bank
uTorrent has always had a forum section with feature requests, but that was less visible for the average user and the progress of the requests was difficult to track. With the new Idea Bank users can see at a glance what features are being worked on and what has already been implemented.
“Although the Forums are popular, they tend to select a much more advanced community of enthusiasts. We felt it was important to put something as critical as feature requests closer to the mass of mainstream users,” Morris told TorrentFreak.
Those who have a feature suggestion or want to vote on one can go to the Idea Bank and participate. At the time of writing the bank holds 55 ideas, one of these is being worked on and three ideas have been implemented already. A Linux version of uTorrent is the top idea at the moment, followed by an email notification for completed downloads.
