LEGO Cuusoo to be replaced with LEGO Ideas

If nothing else this is great for the change of name - every knows how to pronounce "ideas"! :P

@Zips, It least I hope they do.:P

What is so funny with the word "ideas"?

Also interesting that they are allowing younger aged users to submit ideas, thats definitely something i've seen a lot of parents complain about.

I hope they have an option to filter out / flag sets based on commercial franchises so projects that use fresh and original ideas get more recognition on the front page.

Yay! Now I must prepare my projects. What worries me is the one year thing...

One year to reach 10,000 supporters. Good this will eliminate A LOT of poor ideas that do not promote via social pages.

In other words, LEGO is again trying to avoid making the Invisible Hand (looking at the one year timespan)...

One thing with TLG taking this in-house now is that I really hope we see a more thorough vetting of projects submitted so we don't keep seeing dozens of essentially the same thing - I don't believe cuusoo ever bothered to check new submissions against existing and whether or not they truly bring something different to the table - and I hope they refine the voting pop up better, its not very clear at the minute.

This also makes me wonder more about the Doctor Who announcement and how the timing falls with this announcement, presumably if a DW set gets approved after the review it will be one of the first with the LEGO Ideas branding.

I don't like that they will be deleted after one year.

10k in one year is completely impossible to pull off for anything with no third-party IP behind it. I guess that means AFOLs will just take their business elsewhere, like oh I dunno, the all-new http://moc.bricklink.com/ , what a coincidence...

Now, I suppose in terms of money it's a win-win. TLG is better off selling IP du jour, and we are better off making actual bucks from our MOCs right now rather than waiting for them to get rejected five years down the line.

But in terms of creativity, it's a death blow to Cuusoo. There are only so many third-party IPs you can submit, and of course fewer still actually get approved, so what's the point. TLG can just go straight to Wikipedia, take the "List of all movies", "List of all video games", "List of all TV shows", put them up for an online straw poll, and check back in a year.

And buried in their own web site — I don't know about that. LEGO.com always had a number of galleries that nobody really cared about except for the submitters themselves. Add into the equation the now-lowered age barrier, and we basically just got ourselves yet another such gallery. Might as well just browse the fan-submitted photos in the back of the Club Magazine instead.

Oh well. It was fun while it lasted!

> 10k in one year is completely impossible to pull off for anything with no third-party IP behind it.

It's provably not, Schwallex. Whilst it might be uncommon, Peter Reid's Exosuit made it to 10k supporters in less than a year. Yes, the model had been around for a good while before that, but it was only on Cuusoo from 28th March 2012 to 9th January 2013. So, that's only just over nine months.

Never say die. High quality will out.

I'm not certain if one year for 10,000 is the best solution. I'm glad project will eventually be culled, but I'd be more in favor of something like 6-10 months and less than 1,000 support it is archived. Maybe if LEGO would do more to get the existence of this system known for more casual fans, so there would be more projects actually hitting the 10,000 votes milestone, I wouldn't be as bothered. Maybe after moving it in house and making more accessible to LEGO's target audience, LEGO does plan to make more people aware of voting on fan projects to make into sets.

@Neil you say that as if high quality is all it takes, when clearly that is not the case. In fact quality and popularity are at best orthogonal, and at worst actually inversely related.

But I will gladly move to say it is merely *almost* impossible. That doesn't help much anyway. You only need to make it just a tiny bit more impossible than it was before to drive people away. Straw, camel, back, yada yada.

You say Exo Suit, I say DeTomaso's birds. Just look at the impressive list of places he got promoted on: ThisIsColossal, BBC, Wired, The Guardian... He has zillions of fans, followers, likes, retweets. And he made it into the Beautiful LEGO book, available over Amazon to every doorstop on this planet. But it still took him 20 months. So basically TLG just told him, next time, don't even try.

More to the point, that's the cream of the crop we are talking about here. So I have to be Peter Reid, *and* have tons of luck, *and* promote like a madman, and then after all that I *still* might get rejected because Disney happens to release a western, or simply because reasons.

Anyway. Cuusoo is not, and never was, about quality. Quality is what the TLG Review is then about. Cuusoo is only about popularity. Which is a stance as fine as any other, especially if you are a business, and this recent move is perfectly in line with it. It's just that I am an AFOL and not Justin Bieber. It is simply not my line of trade.

As Sariel once said, "I have a job and a hobby. I don't want to have two jobs and no hobbies."

@Schwallex - I agree with everything you just said.

But maybe, MAYBE, LEGO Ideas will get the exposure, the LEGO advertising, that Cuusoo never had. I'm still amazed that Cuusoo was never advertised on the LEGO website, at LEGO stores, LEGO magazines, and that LEGO employees never heard of it. Possibly 10,000 will be achieveable. And possibly, they'll remove all the nonsense that will never see the light of day, allow better exploration, and better sorting. I also can't see them removing a project because it only made 9000 in 12 months when its so close. And in a couple years, the major IPs will be all sorted through.

Schwallex - great points. I agree with everything you're saying. The fact that the birds--one of the most-promoted and most-popular non-IP projects ever on Cuusoo--would have been deleted is truly disconcerting. If it had been a 2-year period, that would be fine. One year is really not much time at all.

However, that concern aside, we should all be really happy and exciting that Cuusoo has been so successful that it's now a permanent part of TLG. It wasn't long ago that we feared it was going to be discontinued. Cheers to crowd power, and TLG's receptivity to our ideas!

Can't get the Web site to load so I don't know what the changes are exactly so I'm just going to go with what my first thoughts were. Number one. Someone could design the best lego garbage truck there is, but if after a year it has less than 10000 likes lego can just take it and release it as a city set and not have to give out the royalty. Number 2 lowering the age limit. I have nothing against that provided the quality is there, but let say little Johnny builds a set with just five bricks and mommy thinks it's the best thing ever and let's him put it online. Now we have to wade through sets like that to get to the good stuff. After a while we just give up and good stuff doesn't get 10000 likes, and lego can take the good ideals for themselves.

Got website to load so now I know the age limit is 13 so maybe my thoughts on little Johnny are off but there still could be some bad sets/ideals that get posted.

Posted about this a few minutes ago on my weblog... yes the 10,000 supporters in one year is going to be a big game changer, and indeed I think there's going to be a smaller handful of widely pushed projects - most of them based on IPs - as a result. @Schwallex echoes my sentiments to the letter.
I'm not in the CUUSOO/Ideas game and probably won't be, but I'll do my small bit in helping promote projects.

I am with SilentMode, I never really wanted to make projects, but when I am truned onto one that is even half decent i put my support onto it, even if I am not a fan of the series or subject matter.

10,000 supporters in a year otherwise deletion? I think maybe people should get a bit longer if they reach a certain milestone, like 5,000. It would still filter out unpopular ones, but give some projects more of a chance.

Schwallex and behemothjosh good points, and since I am one of the younger TFOLs who will now be creating projects, I would like to promise right here that all of my ideas will be of professional quality.

As stated by other users, I see 10,000 'votes' in a year a near impossible feat. An alternative would be for a project to get say, 3500 votes in a year to be kept on the site. This would allow projects of quality to remain, whilst removing the tat posted by the 13 year olds that stand no chance of being produced. I guess it comes down to how much promotion TLG puts into the new site.

Only time will tell...

What is lowering the age limit going to bring to this other than an even greater flood of ill-conceived IP-based ugly tat? They should be looking at a few months and deleting everything with less than a few hundred votes; not choking off successful projects at the last minute.

Any project that fails to get to 10,000 votes can be resubmitted, but will start out with zero votes again.

If a project takes 3 years to get to 10k voters, the reality is most likely that there is not enough demand for such a set to warrant looking at it. I think a time limit makes perfect sense.
More than that, though, I'm sure they hope/expect that by putting it under the Lego name, instead of some weird Cuuso/Cusso/Cuusso name that nobody has heard of, that it will generate extra traffic.

^^ They should have done something like if a project fails to get 10,000, it keeps 10% of supporters if the creator chooses to repost.

They need to make some sort of checkpoint system. So you have to hit monthly, quarterly, or annual votes in order to stay on the site.

I hope this means Tim loses his job. That moron banned me from the site because I dared to say what everyone else was thinking, i.e. that the female minifigure project was political correctness gone mad.

I hated the way Cuusoo operated towards the end. Everyone seemed to be treating it like a big, selfish money-making opportunity. Egotistical builders were obsessed with micro-managing and constantly changing their ideas after they had already been submitted to the website and the voters kept congratulating them for attracting supporters. As I understood it, Cuusoo wasn't intended as just another building contest; it was meant to be a chance to communicate good ideas to The LEGO Group.

Why not just submit your idea then sit back and hope for the best? Instead, these arrogant attention-seekers were distorting the system by advertising their creations to people who aren't even LEGO fans, desperate to give the false impression of support so they could scam a few dollars out of TLG. I think the ideas should be anonymous and there should be no money involved. Then maybe we'd see genuinely good LEGO sets rather than whatever rubbish people think will attract clicks from non-LEGO fans.

Bye Bye Cuusoo/Ideas. I don't like new TOS...

Cool - I've never been able to register on CUUSOO - I have a user name but no matter how many times I try, the confirmation email never arrives - perhaps I'll get to vote on LEGO Ideas :-D

The title is a bit misleading. LEGO CUUSOO seems to have morphed into Ideas, rather than having been replaced. ;)

Anyway, I'm glad LEGO saw CUUSOO as successful, and it'll be fun to see the changes in Ideas. The 365 day limit will definitely filter out a lot of trash, but I'm afraid it will be too harsh and brilliant hidden gems (of which there are a good many on CUUSOO) will be lost. I'd prefer a system that gave time for projects to reach set milestones (500, 1,000, 5,000 etc.) instead of having to get all 10k within the time limit.

@Huey1 - LEGO seems to be pleased with how CUUSOO went, so I don't think they'll be firing their staff members.

@mr_skinny - Did you check your SPAM folder? Sometimes things end up there. :)

This is interesting - I wonder why TLG made the change to a one-year limit on projects? Maybe they didn't really want projects the the SW mini figure bucket being up there too long - even when re-submitted they still have to accumulate all 10000 supporters.

Boy, that'd be unfortunate if your project expired with 9990 supporters.

Technically the content is not too different, but as an Asian I'm alittle concerned with the change of title. Maybe the team want to show the changes or they just want to make it more "international" and get rid of that Japanese origin. Uh, though products are still more impotant than titles.

I don't have too much issues with new rules. Instead of saying that weak projects can be deleted faster, I hope the real use of the rules is to urge FOLs to vote more projects they care about so that each review season can have at least 15 projects passed. I honestly think the achieved projects so far are really not too many. (40 projects in six years? Uh......).

@Dorayaki - from what I can tell CUUSOO, LEGO's partner in creating LEGO CUUSOO, will no longer be involved. The new Terms of Service for LEGO Ideas mention CUUSOO nowhere, whereas the Terms of Service for LEGO CUUSOO refer to CUUSOO many times (the "service provider"). Additionally, in the announcement LEGO CUUSOO staff said this:

"We are grateful for the many years of collaboration and experimentation between our two companies and wish CUUSOO SYSTEM continued success, building CUUSOO as an open crowdsourcing platform for brands to connect with their fans on cuusoo.com."

To me this sounds like something they would only say when parting ways with CUUSOO.

Assuming CUUSOO will no longer be involved, the name change is necessary.

Meh, I found the selection team to be a bit idiotic at times, but we still got amazing projects, and we still have the mech suit up. Lets just hope they don't screw it up. I, however, am not in favor of the 1 year policy. Maybe about 6 months to get at least 1,000 supports, but it still won't filter the results. I have seen people with over 1,000 supporters and they still have a mediocre LDD screenshot instead of an actual built model. Also, take the Prometheus project for example, it only has 500 supports, yet looks stunning.

Yes, it looks like Cuusoo the Japanese cooporation is not going with TLC in the future, so TLC want to start their own thing. The only question is if "Cuusoo" the name has more market supports, or a new name can bring more people into this website. Kinda agree "Idea" could be too bland to receive attentions.

I don't see why everyone is getting so upset with the 1-year time limit. Since people will be able to sign in with a Lego ID (I think?) and it will be part of the main Lego site, it should see much higher traffic and therefore a lot more votes.

Also, thanks to the 1-year limit, I have a feeling things will get a little interesting around April 20 2015, as some projects will be left with only a week or so to get 1000 or 1500 votes before disappearing from the list.

It should be fun to watch.

@kitik - May 1 is the specified deadline for all currently active projects.

I think a year is way too strict, but I like the other changes (especially glad to be able to submit a project- which is why I joined in the first place). Your project shouldn't be considered only because it happened to get voted for quickly (and with many people, it can take time to get their projects into the spotlight).

@CCC: the one-year limit is an excellent thing. I myself have previously argued, "the longer a project takes, the likelier it is that the very first people to support it won't even remember it anymore, or will have long moved on from LEGO, or will have indeed been hit by a semi. What TLG really wants to see is if there are 10k buyers in the market right now, not if there were 10k potential supporters in the entire history of mankind."

So it's a good thing for them. It just means more work for me now. And even for DeTomaso or Peter Reid or Perijove, for that matter.

@kitik as I said in a previous comment, there already are MOC galleries on LEGO.com, and people already are able to vote on them, but nobody actually does it.

I myself have some stuff submitted to the Creator galleries. The same stuff as my Cuusoo project, and submitted around the same time. On Cuusoo, I'm reaching a thousand supporters. On LEGO.com, I am still waiting for my very first fan. As indeed do most submissions.

And here's the Technic gallery sorted by the number of fans:

http://www.us.lego.com/en-us/technic/gallery/?sortfield=mostlikes&to=100&from=0

Have a look at that Crawler re-design in the second position. That thing went on to become an actual product. A whole year ago. And it still only has 339 fans even now. Mind you, that's an astronomical figure by LEGO.com standards. Most submissions have to make do with much less.

And there, right next to the Crawler is a Land Rover. With a whopping 330 fans. All the while the Technic Land Rover on Cuusoo has long got to 10000 *and* rejected.

If you think LEGO.com will be getting you free extra traffic, think again. And remember that TLG actually doesn't *want* you to get free extra traffic in the first place. The whole point of Cuusoo has always been that *you* get *them* free extra traffic. They are not there to promote a model for you to an existing audience. You are there to bring in all-new audiences, to market LEGO to the world for them. TLG would be ill-advised to start giving you thousands of supporters for free all of a sudden. And they won't.

Again, none of that is a bad thing per se. Popular franchises will thrive just like before. This is clearly not changing the game for everyone, not even for most people. All I'm saying is that it is changing the game for a small bunch of folks: us AFOLs. Cuusoo was never really meant to be a site for us, but now it's finally official. Is all.

I think it's the wrong way to filter projects. For a company all about creative products it shows a distinct lack of imagination. I think projects should have a much shorter life, but be able to 'buy' themselves more time by hitting staged voting targets.

LEGO want to attract site views as well as ideas. They want people to go out and promote their own ideas. But it's an all-or-nothing system at the moment. So turn hits and votes into a form of 'virtual currency' that creators can 'spend' to keep their (or maybe even their friends') projects alive for longer, or even 'buy' a block of bonus votes.

That would encourage people to put up more and more varied, possibly short-lived, ideas, but choose to channel the support into their best ones. And those with popular models would then be better placed to support others projects they like. It would also mean people who just throw up random junk and leave it wouldn't be able to keep pushing the same tat over and over.

1 year limits would be bad for all projects who wouldn't make it. In subjective views, most project owners might just want to keep waiting and never get their hope (not saying those junk projects), but unfortunately their projects can't move anyone's heart and just stay in fewer than hundred votes.

In objective views, the real pity is for those who are still able to achive 10,000 votes but need more than 1 year to do it. Some very old projects do fit in this mode, because they're kinda like slow-to-warm-up and often lose to those quickly achived projects with great supports and popular license. What the new site needs to do is to actively urge voters to make quick decisions and increase visibilities of all projects.

If I have to worry about someone, I'd say the Piano project is because it's used six years to get that 6'000 votes, and it needs to get the rest 4,000 votes to catch up the upcoming deadline.

There are 80,000 members of Brickset and each project needs 10,000 votes. Can everyone take this opportunity before the new kickoff to take a look at the projects on Cuusoo again and see what else we can support? I'm going to give that a try tonight. Right now I'm supporting 124 projects on Cuusoo, but I am sure there are triple that number that I could support. I'm going to get at it tonight.

I'm with you DarthWalle! I think that most of my projects on CUUSOO are going to bite the dust with the new 1 year deadline rule. I just hope that my Sound of Music project is able to get a chance... @Dorayaki, I don't think that the Piano project is going to make it. Because it's gotten 1000 votes a year, I 'm not trying to sound negative.

Would my Sound of Music project, http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/62284, be considered as junk?

^ I wouldn't say junk, although it doesn't seem like something that would pass review, just because I don't think a lot of people would buy it.

I agree with you MOCDoc. It took over a week to make, but I don't know to many 7-11 year old's who know about the Sound of Music.

It would be more of something for AFOL's

@Schwallex: Why are you thinking that the LEGO.com galleries and the LEGO Ideas site will be equivalent in traffic? They won't be. Not even close. The reason LEGO Cuusoo got as much traffic as it did even when it wasn't an actual part of the LEGO website is that it gave an actual incentive for people to use it: the projects that get enough support have a chance of becoming actual sets. The LEGO.com galleries currently offer no such incentive, because pretty much every single function they perform for AFOLs is performed more effectively by other image hosting sites like Flickr and MOCpages, or forums like Eurobricks. Many AFOLs don't bother hosting their own MOCs there, let alone look for or support others. LEGO Ideas won't have that problem because activity there, whether in the form of new projects or supports, has the potential to result in genuine rewards.

Also, I don't see why the new site will be any worse for AFOLs than the old one. Most of the franchise-based projects to become successful were created by AFOLs, after all, and got widespread AFOL support. The fact that people without LEGO Cuusoo accounts could support projects has been criticized as letting non-AFOLs drown out the voices of AFOLs. But at the same time, most of the people who would support a LEGO Cuusoo project are people who, in some capacity, care about the LEGO brand and are excited to see it depict certain subjects. Are they not "real" AFOLs just because that interest in LEGO doesn't define their online activity, and it's only certain products and concepts that pique their interest?

Of course, there have been some people who claim that milking non-AFOL online communities for votes will result in a lot of "invalid" votes that won't actually result in product purchases. The Minecraft proposal was held up as a key example of that idea, and also a key example of how very wrong it turned out to be. It's gone on to become an ongoing theme. In fact, I can't remember any of the LEGO Cuusoo products since the service went global that HAVEN'T ended up being wildly successful products, whether or not their supports came from within designated AFOL online communities.

@Aanchir: ah, I think there's a misunderstanding. I am not saying that LEGO Ideas will be equivalent in traffic to the LEGO.com galleries. Of course not!

Quite obviously, it will be (at the very least) equivalent to the current Cuusoo traffic + the current LEGO.com galleries traffic. We have X now, and we will get X + Y in the future. That's a most definite increase.

It's just that kitik (and many others I guess) think or hope that the second summand is gigantic, that we "should see much higher traffic and therefore a lot more votes". But if we look at the actual numbers, trying to quantify what Y actually is right now, then it turns out it's minuscule. A drop in the bucket. If you're the Technic Land Rover, it's a couple hundred additional votes. If you're something else, a dozen votes is probably more like it. (And that's assuming that up until now there's been no overlap whatsoever between the people voting on LEGO.com and the people voting on Cuusoo.)

Of course you are right that we don't know how large Y will be one year from now. The current numbers don't have to be perfectly accurate. But they are certainly way more accurate than simply crossing fingers that every project that used to get 3k votes a year (which already is a lot) will magically be getting to 10k in the same time frame (or even just to 4k, for that matter) just by virtue of a URL change.

And again, it's not in TLG's interest to have the Y be gigantic, to promote your project for you. It's in their interest that you promote it for them. The point of the switch is for Cuusoo to bring additional traffic to LEGO.com, not the other way round. Cast a vote, buy a current set. Exit through the gift shop.

By the way, I just remembered Glen Bricker had this handy list of projects sorted by how long it will take them to get to 10k:

http://www.brick-hero.com/c_days10k.php

I didn't realize how few projects there really were that would make the cut at their current speed. It's just seven. Seven!

Wayne Manor, X-Mansion, 50th Batman Anniversary, Frozen, Le Petit Prince, the UC Berkeley campanile, and The Goonies. *Everything* else will get deleted, unless @DarthWalle's dedication turns out to be contagious.

@Schwallex - thanks for the link.

The list is incomplete though... it takes into account most major projects but there are some which are not featured. They include Invisible Hand and LEGO Lightsabers. One at least (if not both) should hit 10k. Then, Hidaka's Piano is not listed. That project has a chance, I feel, as does Labyrinth Marble Maze.

But still I see your point. Only 11 projects, predictably, will make it (if we're lucky). 11 out of 6,000+.

@Aanchir, Schwallex, DuperDKong, etc.

I definitely think that they will begin to publicize the new "Lego Ideas" site in general, and that will generate more viewers and voters moving through each day. Otherwise, yes, they would just be setting it up so that only 7 to 11 projects ever had a chance of ever passing in the future, and that would strangle their whole marketing initiative!

And no worries, If people are signing in with their "Lego ID" account, then they will be able to easily tell which votes are coming from hardcore AFOL fans, and which votes are from more casual fans or new fans, or young kids or adults coming out of their Dark Ages, and they will take all that data into account when they make decisions!

I think it will be a huge improvement, at least because it will give Lego complete control over the layout of the platform... I can't wait to see it! =D

It is starting =D

http://lego.cuusoo.com