September 2008

We released a couple of new things yesterday. As always, this our way of proving that we like you and actually listen to all of that feedback you post on Get Satisfaction.

Nearby People on the Place Page

Several people asked us to include a link to the nearby people right on the place page. You can already get a list of nearby people for your existing location or a list of people currently at a place, but now you can also see who else is near a place before you decide to go there.

Better Previous / Next Links

People with mouse coordination challenges were complaining about how our previous / next links on the search page were teeny, tiny links to ‘>>’. We’ve expanded it out so that the link also includes the Previous / Next text.

We also made a few minor changes to m.shizzow.com and a few bug fixes this week.

What?!? Only a couple of changes this week?

Yes, we are slackers. Or maybe, just maybe, we are working very hard to give you SMS support for shouting, and it is taking up most of our development time.

As always, keep your feedback coming at us on Get Satisfaction.

Shizzow hadn’t even been released for 1 hour, and people were already asking for a mobile version of the site. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

Today we are releasing the alpha version of the Shizzow mobile site, which will be available at http://m.shizzow.com. The mobile site will feature a small subset of the functionality that is available on the full website. The mobile site will essentially allow you to find a place, shout from a place, listen to a person and find your friends!

We’re releasing the mobile site as an alpha version, because we know there will be bugs here and there, and we also cannot guarantee that it will work on every platform. We’ve tested the mobile site and know it is working in Firefox 2&3, Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3, Opera 9. We’ve seen it work on Blackberry and Verizon phones, but haven’t had a chance to perform extensive testing on those platforms. We know it doesn’t work on Windows Mobile (you cannot login), but don’t know why, so if you have any bright ideas let us know!

If you have any feedback for the mobile site, please let us know on Get Satisfaction.

We see many people shouting from a home location. If the purpose of Shizzow is to connect with your friends for coworking, coffee, drinks, or whatever, why would anyone shout from home? We get this question quite a bit, and in asking around, I’ve seen a few responses to this question

• Habit. We shout from everywhere else, so maybe it’s just a habit.
• Be able to see nearby people. This is my main reason for shouting from home. If I shout from home, I can periodically check in with the nearby people link to see if anyone shows up at one of my neighborhood coffee shops or restaurants.
• To “leave” a place. Quite a few people were shouting from home as way to designate that they were no longer at the last place they shouted. I’ll be curious to see what happens now that we have our new Leave a Place feature implemented.

Why do you shout from home? We would love to hear more about the reasons people shout from home here in the comments.

Now that the RSS feeds for Shizzow are public, we would love to have a widget that takes an RSS feed from Shizzow and makes it look awesome in a blog sidebar. Yes, yes, we know this isn’t hard to do, but would you rather have us spend an hour on a widget or spend an hour working on SMS support and m.shizzow.com?

So here’s the deal:

• Email the code for your widget and a URL where we can see it in action to dawn at shizzow.com with the subject: “awesome contest entry” before midnight on 9/13.
• The Shizzow team will make an entirely subjective judgment call to pick the one we like the most.
• We will buy the winner a drink at Beer and Blog or a similar tech event here in Portland.

We don’t really know exactly what we want, so there are no specs for the widget. Use your best judgment to come up with something cool.

We will post the code for the widget on the Shizzow site for anyone to use while giving credit to the original author. In other words, you are doing this for fame and glory.

We made some pretty cool changes this week with some enhancements that you have been begging for us to include. … You’re welcome!

Leave a place

We are no longer the Hotel California of online apps. Shizzow is now new and improved with more leaving capabilities. If you are leaving a place, you can go to the place page and click the “leave” button. Your shout page will show that you “left” the place x minutes ago.

Public RSS Feeds

You can now get public RSS feeds of any user or place page. The only exception is for private users. Users with private accounts do not have RSS feeds, and shouts from private users will never appear in the RSS feed for a place. We’re excited to see what interesting new uses people will have for the RSS feeds.

Scott Kveton

Did you know that Scott Kveton, Portland’s preeminent pizza connoisseur and bacon enthusiast, is an advisor for Shizzow? How could you know, since we forgot to include him on our about page. This is a bug fix, not a new change, since Scott has been providing us with advice for months.

As always, keep logging those issues and suggestions for improvements in Get Satisfaction, and we’ll keep making Shizzow work better for you!

Privacy is an important consideration for any application where you share your location information. In a previous post, I talked about the tie between location and context; however, you should also be thinking about privacy. Knowing when to share your location and when not to share can really help you make productive use of location applications.

You would want to share your location at times when you are interested in having other people join you. If I am working at Stumptown, I might be interested in having people join me to work together, or I might want to have friends stop by for drinks at my favorite pub.

However, there are also times when I would not want to share a location:

• Physical security: prevent putting yourself in situations that could be dangerous
• Private time: not wanting to share intimate family moments
• Solitude: having time to concentrate or recharge

Privacy is something that has always been a priority for Shizzow from the earliest versions to the current beta release. While the decision to shout or not shout is always up to you, we also give you some other options to help you control your privacy settings:

• Choose whether to make your shouts public for the entire world to see, or set your account to private in the Privacy Preferences page where only friends who have your permission can see your location.
• You also have the ability to go into what we call “stealth mode”, making your current location unavailable to anyone. It provides a way to make oneself disappear from Shizzow temporarily, in a sense.
• Shouts can also be deleted from Shizzow. You can delete a single shout or delete all of your shouts from the site at anytime. However, keep in mind that deletion from any site may not be absolute, sine the data could have been copied by other users or indexed by search engines.
• Also, keep in mind that places are always public (regardless of your account privacy settings), since all members share the same place locations. In other words, if you are comfortable sharing your address with the world, you can enter your house on Shizzow, but if you want a little more privacy, you should either leave your house off of Shizzow or use a nearby intersection as the location.

We’ve been very careful to make sure that all aspects of the site respect the privacy settings of each user to avoid inadvertently exposing the private data. Our privacy policy also has more information about how we protect your information.

We provide the tools that allow you to control your privacy settings, but ultimately it is up to you to decide how much or how little to share. At Shizzow, we encourage you to think before you shout.