The TypeRacer Blog

Looking back on 2009, Kicking off 2010

typeracer — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:35:35 +0000

Thanks for making 2009 another great year on TypeRacer! Last year we launched some groundbreaking features such as typing in 50 other languages and many more great things are coming in 2010.

To kick off the new year, I’d like to first unveil the I TYPERACER T-shirt designed by Alex Foygel (you can see more of his designs on his blog). It’s available for purchase from the new TypeRacer T-shirt shop. Order yours today!

Now let’s take a look back at 2009. Last year, you’ve helped us reach the milestone of 10 million races, hopefully improving your typing speed as a result! We’ve carefully analyzed the data for 2009 and can help you predict how much you can expect to improve in 2010. Here is a chart that plots the average change in typing speed of a user by number of races finished last year.*

The above chart plots just the averages, so your “mileage may vary,” but we can tell you that 1913 people increased their speed by more than 10 wpm after only 100 races. There were also a few individuals who showed outstanding achievement, improving by more that 30 wpm throughout the year! Let’s meet the top 10 most improved typists of the year:

Congratulations are in order to Luís for topping the list with a 50 wpm improvement! (We’ll send him a free T-shirt).

Now we want to hear your thoughts. What new features are you hoping to see on TypeRacer in the coming year?

* we measured “improvement” as the difference between the average of one’s races numbered 10 through 20 and their last 10 races.

TypeRacer Goes International

typeracer — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:22:04 +0000

Typing in other languages has been the #1 most requested feature since way back when TypeRacer was born. Today we’re launching the first international release of TypeRacer with support for 51 languages!

Click on the change your language link at the bottom of the homepage to see the full selection. The name and flag of the language you’ve selected will appear under the logo in the upper left corner. Your race results and typing speed will be saved separately for each, so it’s easy to track your progress in any language.

The scorecard now displays the country where each racer is located.

TypeRacer has always appealed to an international audience, and I’m happy to give you all the ability to race in your language. Even if English is your primary language, it’s fun to learn how to type in other languages. So far, I’ve mastered Spanish and French, and struggling with Russian, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Typing speed, by default, is measured in words per minute for English and in characters per minute for other languages, but you can always chose the format that's best for you. Just click on the CPM (or WPM) link at the top of the homepage to save your preference.

This release represents a giant leap into the future for TypeRacer, but it isn’t perferct. For one thing, the text translations need more work. We used Google Translate on the English texts and the results, at best, are easy to type but don’t make much sense. In the worst case, some of the translations might contain left-over English characters and punctuation, requiring a brief switch of keyboard layouts to type them. We’ve tried to correct all the texts to the best of our ability, but with all these languages, we now have 23000 texts to keep track of! Let us know if you see any errors in your language and we’ll try to fix them right away.

TypeRacer International is still a work in progress. Over the coming months, we’ll work on improving the text quality and also translating the menus and captions. But the main thing right now is to get more people typing in other languages, so that you’re not just racing against bots. We need your help to spread the word. Send out the URL for the homepage in your language to all your friends or go head-to-head with them in a private racetrack for your language of choice. We have empty high scores to fill in every language, so start racing!

Typing in other languages has been the #1 most requested feature since TypeRacer was born back in March, 2008. Today we’re launching the first international release of TypeRacer with support for 51 languages!

Click on the change your language link at the bottom of the homepage to see the full selection. The name of the language you’ve selected will appear under the logo in the upper left corner. Your race results and typing speed will be saved separately for each, so it’s easy to track your progress in any language.

The scorecard now displays the country where each racer is located.

TypeRacer has always appealed to an international audience, and I’m happy to give you all a chance to race in your language. Even if English is your primary language, it’s fun to learn how to type in other languages. So far, I’ve mastered Spanish and French, and struggling with Russian, as you can see in the screenshot above.

This release isn’t perfect. For one thing, the text translations need more work. We used Google Translate on the English texts and the results at best are easy to type but don’t make much sense. In the worst case, some of the translations might contain left-over English characters and punctuation, requiring a brief switch of keyboard layouts to type them (let us know if you see any such places in your language). This is all still a work in progress. Over the coming months, we’ll work on improving the translations and also translating the menus and captions into every language. For now, everything but the typing texts is still in English.

The main thing right now, though, is to get more people typing in other languages, so you’re not just racing against bots. We need your help to spread the word. Send out the URL for the homepages in your language to all your friends. Go head-to-head with them in a private racetrack for your language. We have empty high scores to fill in every language, so start racing!

Typing speed is usually measured in words per minute (WPM) for English and in characters per minute (CPM) for other languages, but you can always chose the format that's best for you. Just click on the CPM (or WPM) link at the top of the homepage.

Pinning, dragging, flagging, laughing

typeracer — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:55:27 +0000

I’m happy to say we have just completed the second TypeRacer release of the summer! The first thing you’ll notice is that scorecards can now be pinned and dragged around on the screen so you can compare people’s stats. Just click (or right-click) on any username to bring up the options menu and select “Pin scorecard.” Once pinned, you’ll be able to move this user’s scorecard around by dragging its upper left corner. You can “un-pin” the scorecard by clicking on the pin or just closing it. For now, the scorecard shows you the user’s stats and links to their Facebook or Myspace profiles (pinning will come in handy if you want to click on those links). When we introduce extended user profiles and pictures, you’ll be able to see them here as well.

The most significant new feature, though, is the ability to report a user. If you see someone with an offensive username or someone you suspect is cheating, please report them using the same menu (click on the username then select “Report user” next to the red flag). Your participation in this will greatly speed up the process of removing Terms of Service violators from the site.

We’ve also added a lot of new texts to type and made a bunch of minor improvements to the site. Many of the new text were submitted by you guys – thanks! The others were contributed by our friends at Bookfail.com (hope you can handle racing and laughing at the same time!)

TypeRacer – The 1st Anniversary Edition

typeracer — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:00:43 +0000

This spring marked one year since TypeRacer went live, and what a great year it has been – almost from day one, TypeRacer has been serving more than a million races every month! It’s been so much fun building this first-of-its-kind online experience and talking to many of you about how to make it even better.

There have been lots of challenges as well: making the site work in all kinds of browsers, across social networks, overcoming database outages, dealing with cheaters, and many, many, more. This stuff took up so much time, that I’m actually surprised we were able to get anything else done at all. In spite of all that, the past 12 months saw the release of some major features like private racetracks, permanent accounts with race histories, and recently, the Facebook App. There is so much more still to come, and today, we’re kicking off TypeRacer’s 2^nd summer season with a brand new release!

New Features

Improved player matching: From now on players are matched up based on WPM proximity instead of skill level. This means that a 40-WPM Average player and a 42-WPM Pro can finally go up against each other in a public race. This change makes races so much more balanced and competitive, especially if you type in the 55-75 WPM range like I do and were constantly being smoked by 90-WPM people like I was!

More skill levels: The Megaracer skill level has been split into the 55-79 WPM Typemaster level and Megaracer for 80+ WPM.

Many of you, especially those who type very fast, have been asking for these two changes, and we’re happy to finally deliver on our promise!

You might be wondering why we picked 80 WPM as the cut-off for Megaracer? That’s because it happens to be just above the top 10% line if we were to graph everyone’s scores. So if you’re still a Megaracer — congratulations — you type faster than 90% of our community! Which brings us to the next point:

Global ranking: So you didn’t make it to the top 20 but still want to know where you stand? Now you can, with the new percentile-based rank on your scorecard! In this screenshot, for example, Alejandro types faster than 69.3% of the people. (We also made it easier to see who’s a bot).

Support for New Browsers

Internet Explorer 8
Safari 4 Beta

Tweaks and Bug Fixes

the race again link in single player game no longer takes you to a multiplayer game

commas and semicolons are no longer underlined to differentiate them from periods and colons (see the screenshot)
scorecards no longer pop up when a car enters an idle mouse pointer, so you won’t have any undesired interruptions while typing (see the screenshot)
+ many more bugs that you hopefully never noticed

Hope you enjoy these new changes! There’s more on the way!

P.S. We’re now on Twitter: follow @typeracer for news and my latest thoughts.

Beam me up, Facebook

typeracer — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:00:14 +0000

If you enjoy TypeRacer and have a Facebook account, help us spread the word by installing the TypeRacer Application on Facebook!

It’s easy to link your existing typeracer.com account to the Facebook app. When you do, your completed races on typeracer.com will appear on Facebook and vice-vera. To link your accounts, click on “My Account” under your name (as seen on the above screenshot) after you’ve installed the application. Just enter your typeracer.com username and password into the box that pops up, and you’re done! From this point on, you’ll be able to race from either typeracer.com or Facebook as you choose (but be sure to still race from inside Facebook every once in a while so that your typing speed gets updated on the Info tab of your Facebook profile).

Naturally, you’ll also want to invite your friends to race you, because the Facebook app shows a score chart just for you and your friends. Where is Liutenant Sulu on this chart? Invite him, please!

Let everyone know you’re serious about typing (and racing) by installing this small Facebook profile badge to show off your skills! You’ll see a grey button for installing this widget above the racing screen on the app’s main page:

You might also want to boldly go where no tab has gone before and put your Facebook account into warp speed with the TypeRacer profile tab:

The profile tab can be installed in a similar way as the profile badge

I really encourage you to try the Facebook app if you haven’t already. TypeRacer is one the very few apps that doesn’t force you to install it just to try it. It also doesn’t force you to invite 20 of your friends to advance to the next level or get a hundred bucks in fake money. If you’ve used other Facebook apps, you’ll know how annoying that is. Unfortunately, not having those dirty tricks makes it harder for a new app to become popular on Facebook. That’s why we need your help to spread the word. Let’s show them that apps can be successful without being annoying!

Encouraging honest competition

typeracer — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:38:14 +0000

A walking race (Helsinki, Finland)

We’ve taken measures in the past that make it harder to cheat, but if you saw the top 20 (Fastest Typists) last month, you know that quite a few individuals are still very much determined.

Starting this week, you will need a (non-guest) account to get onto the Latest High Scores, and at least 100 races to get into the Fastest Typists leaderboard. The first restriction is actually intended more to discourage spam rather than cheating, but the second was introduced specifically to give us enough time to review all contestants and delete those accounts suspected of cheating. That’s right – from now on, all accounts suspected of cheating will be promptly deleted, as stated in our Terms of Service.

Happy Holidays from TypeRacer

typeracer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:05:48 +0000

Hope you’re well-rested and ready for the new year! We certainly are – the long awaited new release of TypeRacer is up, ready to kick off 2009!

More details to follow, but for now, let’s just say that the best news is for our Facebook users – TypeRacer is finally available as a Facebook application. You can link your typeracer.com account with your Facebook account by clicking on My Account inside the app (top right corner, just under your name), to get a head start on your friends. All of your scores will carry over. Enjoy!

Score histories for all quotes now available

typeracer — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:08:53 +0000

We’re really keeping the momentum going this week – lots more quotes are available starting today as well as a “Scores for this quote” section at the end of each race!

If you’ve ever wondered how some of the top players fare on a particularly hard quote, now you can find the answer in the Top 10.

Ever get the feeling of déjà vu when you start typing some quote? I certainly do! Now you can see exactly how many times you’ve actually typed that quote in the past (and hopefully how your speed on this quote has improved)!

The screenshot below shows the improvement of a real TypeRacer user!

Now you might be wondering what are the chances of seeing the same quote again, since they are chosen at random for each race. We did a Monte Carlo simulation to answer this question. Turns out that with the current number of available quotes, you are likely to see one repeated quote after about 19 races and 10 repeated quotes after about 75 races.

The shaded area in the graph below represents the quotes that have been added this week.

Chances of Quotes Repeating

More quotes, more plays, and more speed

typeracer — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:21:30 +0000

September has been rather quiet on this blog, but things have been heating up on TypeRacer with almost exactly 1 million games played this month! We’re ending September with some major improvements to the site. While you won’t actually notice many of these changes, they are acting behind the scenes to make TypeRacer work faster and more reliably than ever.

One thing you will notice is that we’ve added more quotes – 40% more! You’ll see new quotes from movies like The Godfather, The Dark Knight, V for Vendetta, and Sexy Beast. A broad range of books including classics like Discourse on Method, Animal Farm, and the The Great Gatsby, more recent masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five and The Alchemist, topped off with a few titles most relevant to current events, like The Limits Of Power and Bonfire of the Vanities. Many of these quotes were contributed by racers like you.

Now you also get to see your accuracy at the end of the race. Accuracy has a significant impact on your overall typing speed and will be highlighted red if it’s below 98%. See if you can get it in the green! Accuracy is calculated as the ratio of mistyped characters over the total number of characters in the text.

We’ve also compiled a large selection of texts about typing. We read several “learn how to type” books from different decades and looked at some historical perspectives on the origins and longevity of the Qwerty keyboard. The Greatest Stories Never Told, for instance, claims that other keyboard layouts, like Dvorak, “are demonstrably more efficient, but the original continues to thrive,” due to “the power of inertia and the reward of being first,” while Famous Fables of Economics argues the opposite: that the Qwerty keyboard has withstood the test of time and that “the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard.”

We hope you enjoy the new texts!

Get Your High Score

typeracer — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:37:58 +0000

Spaces are filling up fast! TypeRacer now only shows one entry per player on the list of 20 Latest High Scores (each player’s entry is his or her best score within the past hour). This means there’s now room for more people in the top 20!

Many of you have asked for this change, because you didn’t want to see the scoreboard totally dominated by one or two of the best typists. I was looking forward to this as well, but alas, my high score of 81 wpm was still knocked off the list in just a few minutes. Hope you type faster than I do!