I’m very pleased to be able to announce that team surfing will begin on November 1! Everything is in place to allow you to create teams and for your friends and associates to join. Here’s a quick rundown of how it all works:

Each month the members of the top 10 teams will receive an equal amount of the prize pool for their team’s position. To be eligible the team must have 5 active members (i.e. members who surfed during the month). Teams can have up to 10 members. The team leader can set a minimum surf requirement for the month. If a member hasn’t contributed the minimum required page views for the month then they will not be included in the credit prize and it will be equally divided amongst the remaining team members.

Anyone can create a team, but obviously you need your 5 members minimum to be eligible for the top 10 prizes.

There is a join link that appears beside each team name and the team leader will receive a private message asking him/her to approve or reject the application.

The monthly credit prizes will come from a pool of credits that will grow as the month progresses. More surfing activity will increase that pool. I’ve added the ‘Teams’ option on the menu in the member area so you can get your teams organised before November 1. The actual monthly competition starts on November 1.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I hope you’re enjoying the renewed surge of traffic flow and development activity at WhirlwindTraffic. Have you checked out the chat in the surf area yet?

Some members mentioned in the chat that the penguin images were a bit hard to tell apart, so I’ve removed them for now. I’ll add them back in later but it will only be one penguin per surfbar.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just completed the private message system. You can now send private messages to your downline. Old messages will be automatically cleaned out every 60 days. Please use this new feature responsibly – nobody likes to be spammed! Also, if you notice any bugs please submit a ticket.

The PM system brings us a step closer to team surfing. I wanted to have it in place before I finished developing the team surf. I’m expecting teams to be ready to go by this time next week.

Another big announcement (and possibly another first for WWT) … after completing some initial testing I am now performing a full virus scan of all active websites. Each day the websites are checked against a database of 630,647 known viruses. WhirlwindTraffic = safe surfing!

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you’ve ever played a sport that involved a bat or a racket then you’ll know that there’s always a ‘sweet spot’. The same goes for WhirlwindTraffic and because of the increase in surfing activity we just found it! The sweet spot is every 50 page views. Starting right now, you will see a message on the surf bar and you will get an increased surf rate for the following 10 page views. This is currently set at an additional 0.5 but that may increase from time to time when there are a lot of members surfing. The sweet spot happens EVERY 50 page views. This is in addition to existing bonuses and of course if you surf an average of 50 each day then you get 125 credits bonus at the end of the week.

I’ve also added a new table in the members area to give our regular surfers the recognition that they deserve. It lists our top surfers for the previous week. Thanks guys and gals … you really have WWT pumping along right now.

One other thing I’ve done is add a ‘chat view’ on the WWT blog at http://www.whirlwindtraffic.com/blog/ so if you’re wondering what’s happening in the surf chat just visit the blog and all will be revealed .

Development on our new team surf module is well underway and I’ll have more on that over the next couple of weeks.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I have some pretty exciting news today. I announced our new chat feature at WWT just a few days ago and I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that we’ve extended that chat feature to NewWay2Surf.net. Now that may not seem such a big deal BUT the chat is live across both TEs! You can chat with WWT members AND NewWay2Surf.net members at the same time. You’ll be able to see where the other people are by the prefix. If they are on WWT then there will be a [WWT] prefix before their name. If they are on NewWay2Surf.net there will be a [NW2S]. We’ll be adding a third TE in there soon as well – Clickinpeople.com. Exciting stuff, eh? I believe this is the first ever inter-TE chat service!

One of the reasons this all came about is because NewWay2Surf.net went through a bit of a bumpy patch over the past couple of months. The original domain expired and was grabbed by someone else. Jen Herold, who has been a TE owner for far longer than I (and owns NW2S), asked if I’d be interested in forming a partnership to help develop and promote NW2S back to a thriving, busy TE. I couldn’t say no! Besides being a good friend and someone I’ve worked with and for over the past few years, she’s one of my favourite people!

NW2S was the first hover exchange to be built. I know this because it was one of the projects I worked on for Jen – I developed the hover code. Besides that, it’s just a really nice TE with some very unique features such as a built in list building feature that’s really easy to use. Over the coming months we’ll be adding more new (and very unique) features to help you get the most out of both WWT and NW2S.

The next project on the drawing board is team surfing. I know it’s very popular right now and you can be sure that when we release ours there will be a twist!

Popularity: 6% [?]

I’ve just added a chat module in the WhirlwindTraffic surfing area. Surfing traffic exchanges can get a little bit monotonous sometimes, so a little bit of interaction with other surfers might break the boredom! I’ll be in there whenever I’m at the computer so feel free to drop in and give a little feedback or just to say say G’day!

Popularity: 5% [?]