As I mentioned yesterday, the California expansion went so well that we have decided to open it up to Seattle, too. We’re getting a bunch of invite requests, but the servers have been rock solid, so we wanted to continue our plans for world domination (or at least the west coast of the U.S.)

In a similar fashion, here is how you can help:

• If you live in Washington State and would like an invite, please request one! I’ll be sending them out in batches a few times per day.
• If you are already using Shizzow, please send a few invites to your Washington friends and family.
• If you run out of invites and need more, you can petition the Shizzow Invite Fairy using our contact form. I promise that the Shizzow Invite Fairy monitors the contact us emails.
• Send us feedback! If you find any bugs or just want to send us some suggestions for feedback, please submit all feedback to our Get Satisfaction account.

We’re still deciding on the next expansion city. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

Wow, we’ve had a great response to the California expansion! We continue to send more invites and get more users signed up for Shizzow. We also had some great coverage of the launch in case you missed any of it.

• ReadWriteWeb: Simple, Social Friend Finder Shizzow Opens to California
• Webmonkey: Shout Out Your Whereabouts With Shizzow
• Webmonkey: Side Project to Startup: Shizzow Q&A
• Silicon Florist: Shizzow starts shouting in the Bay Area
• Adam DuVander: Create Some Ground Rules
• Greg Hughes: Shizzow grows up, expands into California
• Fast Wonder: Shizzow: Adding the Bay Area and Bootstrapping
• Techmeme

The initial expansion went so well that we’ll be expanding into other areas very soon with Seattle (and other cities in Washington) next on the agenda, so stay tuned for that announcement. If you live in Washington, please go ahead and request an invite now. We’ll be sending them out soon.

The Portland beta of Shizzow has gone really well, and we’ve been saying that we would eventually be opening Shizzow up to other cities. Today is the day!

We wanted to announce that we will be opening up Shizzow to people in California with a focus on the Bay Area. The Shizzow team will start sending invites out today to our friends in the Bay Area, but we need your help!

• If you live in the Bay Area and would like an invite, please request one! I’ll be sending them out in batches a few times per day.
• If you are already using Shizzow, please send a few invites to your Bay Area friends and family.
• If you run out of invites and need more, you can petition the Shizzow Invite Fairy using our contact form. I promise that the Shizzow Invite Fairy monitors the contact us emails.
• Send us feedback! If you find any bugs or just want to send us some suggestions for feedback, please submit all feedback to our Get Satisfaction account.

Our other big announcement today is that we are going to bootstrap Shizzow instead of pursuing funding from VCs or Angel investors. Those of you who are new to Shizzow may not realize that every member of the Shizzow team has a day job, and Shizzow has received every ounce of love that we have left after closing out our daily 9-5 shifts.

Given the economic uncertainties that are affecting many companies and startups, we’ve decided to continue Shizzow as a self-funded project, and to work towards profitability without external assistance. While our technological enhancements may not be rolled out as rapidly we would like, we feel that self-sufficient sustainable growth, ala 37Signals, is the right way to grow Shizzow.

The most common question people ask us is: “How is Shizzow different from the other location-based services?” It’s been a while since we talked about how we are different, and many things have changed in the past couple of months, so we wanted to address the question again.

We think of Shizzow as much more of a social service than a location-based service. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to find and hang out with your friends in the real world for happy hours, parties, nights out on the town, co-working sessions in coffee shops and more. The primary action on Shizzow is to “shout out” your location, but to us declaring your location means nothing unless doing so enables you to get together with people for a face-to-face conversation.

While other services have added the ability to shout from a city, photo sharing, restaurant reviews, and more to their service, we’re maintaining a philosophy of simplicity - if a certain feature doesn’t help you meet new people or get together with friends, we won’t implement that feature.

We developed Shizzow to solve a specific need: the desire to find our friends and hang out with them. The other services had so much clutter that we weren’t able to effectively solve our need using any of the existing location-based applications. We aren’t out to convert our competitors’ users over to Shizzow; plenty of people find value in these other location-based services. However, if you are focused on connecting with your friends in the real world, and like us, you need a better way to find your friends, we hope you will give Shizzow a try.

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs over the past week (ok past 2 weeks, but who’s counting). Organizing Ignite Portland and ThrivePDX left me a little behind on letting you know about the changes, but these enhancements are proof that we do actually pay attention to all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Amazon S3

We’ve offloaded our images to Amazon S3. This will free up our server to do bigger and better things. We might even have a little announcement this week about what we plan to do with all of those free server resources *hint, hint*.

RSS Feed Improvements

We are now including people images in the RSS feeds, and we have added the shout message to the RSS feeds by popular request for those of you building interesting things using our RSS feeds.

Notification Tweak

Added place address to email notifications to help you identify exactly which Stumptown Coffee Shop your friend just shouted from.

Dashboard Changes

By popular request from people tired of having to visit the place page to leave a place, we’ve added a leave button to the dashboard! You can also leave with a message from the dashboard.

@Replies Link to Accounts

In your shout message, @replies will now link to a person’s account page. For example: “I am here having drinks with @ryansnyder” will link to Ryan’s Shizzow home page.

We also fixed a few other bugs and made a couple of additional enhancements. Keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

Some of you may know Kurt Sussman (aka @neophiliac) who can often be identified by his barefoot shoes, which he wears most of the time (he claims that people remember the shoes better than they remember him). We may never know the reason, but I am told that he was not wearing them in his moment of glory on that fateful day, Thursday, November 13th, when Kurt caught a ride back from the Thursday shizzup/tweetup breakfast with J-P Voilleque (aka @lawduck), who went to UGNW to work. Kurt picked up his laptop and joined him to finish setting up an email server for a client. He ordered a cup of coffee instead of his usual dry double cappucino. Bram Pitoyo came in and said hi, but sat with a potential client and missed the momentous occasion.

Luckily Kurt remembered to shout his location. Little did he know that he would soon become famous. What Kurt didn’t realize was that his innocent shout at the Urban Grind was the 10,000th shout on Shizzow - a momentous occasion and one for the history books. OK, maybe I’m overstating it just a teeny bit. While it probably won’t make it into the history books, we did talk about it on Twitter and are now talking about it here in this blog post.

If you don’t already know Kurt, you can also find him at this weekend’s Startup Workout event, which he organizes and hopes to turn into a regular event. He’s also been helping us expand Shizzow into Hawaii, where he lived for a couple of years. Now, if only I could turn that into a “business trip” involving fruity cocktails on the beach …

We thought it would be fun to do some trick or treating using Shizzow. Since we’re too old to wander the neighborhoods knocking on doors for free candy, we decided to have our own trick or treat party (costumes are optional).

Here’s how it works:

• Buy some awesome candy and carry it around with you on Friday, October 31st.
• Hang out in a public place (coffee shop, etc.) where people can find you.
• Shout your location and include the words “trick or treat shizzup” somewhere in your shout message.
• Anyone who comes up to you and says, “trick or treat shizzup” gets some candy (anyone in costume gets an extra piece of candy).
• Make sure you check your Shizzow notifications and move around to join other trick or treaters to get your share of the free candy.
• You better be handing out candy if you plan to trick or treat! Kids can get away with freeloading, but adult freeloaders should expect tricks, not treats!

I will be wandering around and visiting coffee shops where I will attempt to work in between handing out free treats. How about you?

A huge thank you to Matthew Gifford for creating the Shizzow Google Gadget. His reason for creating it was simple:

“I love the service, but often don’t remember to update my location. I needed to find a way to remind myself to use it.

Since its recent redesign, I’ve been using iGoogle several times a day. It seemed like the perfect place to put Shizzow.”

(Quote from Matthew Gifford)

If you want a quick and easy reminder to use Shizzow, I encourage you to take a look! Don’t forget to buy Matt a beverage the next time you see him out and about to thank him for sharing his Shizzow Google Gadget with the rest of us.

Shizzow’s big news of the week was the SMS rollout, but we also baked in a few goodies that we wanted to tell you about…

Custom Searches

When we started Shizzow, Mark, Sam and I had a computer, a monitor, and a stack of index cards scattered around my living room. We were writing user stories out on the index cards - essentially how we expected different people to use Shizzow and walking through each scenario on the computer to determine the hangups they encounter when using Shizzow. One of the scenarios that Mark tossed out was, “I want to find all geeks that are currently in coffee shops in Portland, so I can go find someone to hang out with.” Today we’re rolling out different ways to find people and places… Here are a few examples (you’ll need to be logged into Shizzow for these links):

* Find all people tagged in Portland, OR that are tagged “geek”
* Find all places in Portland, OR that are tagged “coffee”
* Find all people tagged “geek” in places in Portland, OR that are tagged “coffee”

Mozilla Geode

Since everybody was talking about Geode last week, we decided to give it a whirl. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, have Geode installed and have your wi-fi device enabled, the Shizzow dashboard will use Geode to try to auto-determine where you are at. If Geode recognizes your wi-fi router and Shizzow finds Places in the immediate vicinity of that router, you will see a brown location box appear right above “Find a Place to Shout from”. Now click Shout, and you’ll be there both physically and virtually!

Since we know everyone will be busy and on the go this weekend geeking out at WhereCampPDX, we thought that you would want to be able to shout from your cell phone. Well, here we go - Shizzow now supports shouting and notifications via SMS!

There are a few things you should know first:

1. This is a beta. We’ve tested it as much as we can, but we need for you to try it out and let us know if you find any issues or have suggestions for how we can make it better. Until I perfect that mind reading device I’ve been working on in my garage, we can’t fix the bugs that you forget to tell us about! Log all of your suggestions on our Get Satisfaction page.
2. Configuration. Before you run outside to shout from your cell phone, you will need to spend a few minutes on the computer to configure Shizzow to recognize your phone. You can also choose to get notifications via SMS, but choose this option carefully based on the number of people you listen to and your text messaging plan. You can find all of the configuration instructions on our new Using SMS page.
3. Favorites and Nicknames. For the moment, Shizzow only allows you to Shout from your favorite places using nicknames, so you will need to make sure that your favorite places have nicknames. You’ll also want to add places as favorites with nicknames if you plan to shout from them. We won’t always have this limitation, but we wanted to release SMS support quickly with a simple command structure to start getting feedback before we try to make it more feature rich.
4. Memorization and Pop Quiz. OK, there won’t really be a pop quiz, but you will need to memorize some simple commands (or print out a cheat sheet). We’ve kept things as simple as possible with commands like #s for shout and #m for message. You will also notice that since we are bootstrapped (aka we have no money), we are using a shared SMS code, so all of your commands will need to start with “shzow”. All of the commands and examples can be found on our Using SMS page.

The Using SMS page has instructions with details about how to complete all of the steps listed above, so you will want to start there to get up and running with SMS. Most importantly, we want you to have fun with this new feature and let us know how we can make it better.