October 2008

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.

We made a few enhancements and some bug fixes this week as proof that we really do read all of that stuff that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.

Sorting of Messages within Shouts

As Reid pointed out, we were sorting shouts from newest to oldest while messages (appearing within shouts) were sorted oldest to newest. While this might have provided extra brain stimulation for people trying to figure out which messages were the most recent, we agreed with Reid that this was probably not the most intuitive sorting method.

Aggressive Logout

We were being a tiny bit aggressive with our timeouts, which occasionally logged people out even if they had just been active a few seconds ago. We’ve done some work on the session information in the cookie to help prevent some of these logouts.

Working with Favorites

The favorites configuration page to add / update nicknames and delete favorites was buried under the preferences page and was not accessible from your favorites link on the sidebar. I was confused by this, and the developers were kind enough to change it after they got tired of me bugging them about it.

SMS? Not Quite

A few of you noticed that we briefly had support for SMS on Sunday morning. When we rolled it out, we quickly found some unintended side effects and usability issues that we didn’t notice when we tested on our staging server. We were very sad that we had to roll our changes back out of production. On the upside, most of the SMS functionality worked, so it won’t be much longer now. Our initial SMS implementation will make heavy use of favorites nicknames, so if you want to prepare, you can add places to your favorites and give them short nicknames. Bonus points for memorizing your nicknames.

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

We released a a few new features and bug fixes last week. This just shows that we do actually read all of those suggestions, comments, and bug fixes that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.

Better Process to Listen Back

Many of you were frustrated by our listen back process. Originally, you would look at the people listening to you, click the button to listen to someone new, and be redirected to that person’s profile page instead of staying on the listening page to listen to more people. You said that sucked, and we listened. Check it out again now; we think you’ll like it.

Avatars Cropped Instead of Resized

Some of you had stretched, weird looking avatars. As fun as it was for us to mangle your avatars, we are now both cropping and resizing them, instead of just resizing them.

Bug Fixes Galore

We fixed a bunch of random bugs this week. If you don’t believe me, check out all of those Solved and Implemented reports on Get Satisfaction.

What?!? Still No SMS?

Hold onto your britches, we’re almost there! Anyone attending the Portland Web Innovator’s Demolicious event on Wednesday saw the SMS demo on our testing environment. We have it working, but our free SMS provider requires a final review before we can roll it out to make sure that we’re complying with their terms of service. As soon as we have the final approval, we will roll it out on our production server for anyone to use.

Our next big project is the API. I can’t wait to see all of the cool applications from our users! We’ll have more on the API over the next month or so. As always, we love to see that steady stream of feedback on Get Satisfaction.

A few weeks ago, we turned the switch to make the RSS feeds for shouts publicly available. While we have a few people using them for something interesting, the rest of you slackers haven’t done squat with them. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

• FriendFeed: Add your shouts to your FriendFeed account using the generic RSS feed.
• Widgets: Put a cool widget on your blog with your most recent shouts.
• Life streaming: Add your RSS feed to the rest of your life stream.
• RSS Reader: Add certain people to your RSS reader for more close tracking.
• Yahoo Pipes Filtering: Or use your favorite tool to do some cool filtering on RSS feeds.

OK, enough slacking … I dare you (double dog dare you even) to come up with ideas more awesome than the ones here. How are you planning to use the public RSS feeds to do something cool?

Many of you noticed last week that you stopped getting IM notifications from Shizzow. I have been crying over my green tea about all of the missed shouts and the missed opportunities to meet up with cool people that come with them. However, all is not lost.

Here’s what we think happened: we suspect that we have been blacklisted by the Google XMPP servers. If you are using GTalk or any IM service running through Google Applications at your company, you are probably not getting IM notifications. The rest of you are still happily receiving your notifications. We are working hard to resolve it by sending emails into an apparent black hole that is Google HQ. I suspect that it has something to do with the Large Hadron Collider, so if someone in the bay area could verify whether or not Google HQ has been sucked into a black hole, we would appreciate it.

OK, enough whining and speculating. You can still get your IM notifications by signing up for a non-Google XMPP / Jabber based IM account. Jabber.org seems to be working just fine for me right now.

We’ll let you know when we have wrestled our way off of the Google XMPP server blacklist. Wish us luck.