Shizzow!

Hey, my name is Ryan, and I’d like to introduce you to Shizzow. Shizzow is a location-based social networking web service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction. Shizzow provides the technology for you to notify your friends of your location, with as little effort as possible, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.

Let me give a quick example for context… Let’s say that right after work I decide to enjoy happy hour at the restaurant Clarklewis. Once I arrive, I can use Shizzow to “shout out” from my current location. All of my Shizzow friends will receive a notification via email, SMS or IM that says, “Ryan is at Clarklewis”. I can also add a message to customize my status, “Ryan is at Clarklewis - ‘Drinking a refreshing mojito - come and join me!’ ” Now all of my friends know where to find me!

Each member of the Shizzow crew has a full-time job outside of Shizzow, and it’s taken a ton of sweat equity and sleep-deprived nights to bring Shizzow to fruition. But because we’ve believed in our vision and believed in the idea of bringing friends and like-minded people together, the sacrifices we’ve made have not seemed like work but instead like… something we simply had to do. And now, 10 months and tens of thousands of lines of code later, we’re ready to send out the first batch of invites for Shizzow’s private beta.

Along the way, we’ve developed a few tenets that I’d like to share with you:

1. Simplicity. With most features on our website we offer 2 settings: On or Off. We figure that you either want another person to know your exact location, or you don’t want that person to know your location at all. Rather than make you customize 7 different relationship settings for each of your friends, or choose from 6 different location specificity levels for sharing your location, we’re going to make it easy and straight-forward to interact with our service.

2. Community. The entire premise behind Shizzow is for you to get away from your computer screen and virtual relationships, and instead to clink pint glasses with your peeps at happy hour, or to stare dreamy-eyed over a steaming cappuccino into your sweetie’s eyes at the coffee shop. We won’t create gimmicky ways for you to remain on the Shizzow website; we want you to spend as little time interacting with Shizzow as possible, which will grant you more time with the people you care about.

3. Trust. Let’s be frank here: Shizzow is a location-based service that allows you to share your exact location with your friends or the rest of the world. With each line of code we write, we know we have to secure your location information and provide you with the tools to prevent creepy people from finding you. We don’t have a monolithic corporation behind our organization scheming to play Big Brother on you, and at any time, you can find me, look me in the eyes and talk to me about your privacy concerns. My ears are always open.

We’re über-jazzed that we finally get to share our vision with you, and hope you find that Shizzow enables you to live a better life, a life that’s full of meaningful, quality relationships.

Shizzow!

- Ryan and the Shizzow Crew