Opening up Places and Notification Tweaks

We’ve been working on quite a few back end improvements and have been working on the API, so we’ve been making Shizzow better (trust me, even though you can’t see the changes). However, we did sneak in a few improvements over the past couple of weeks that you might enjoy. Again, this is just more proof that we actually read all of the stuff you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Open Places Database

A few people have been experiencing various issues with adding new Places. We used this as a reason to really dig into Places, and to implement the right solution for Shizzow.  And we got a little carried away…

You can now add a Place with no street address if you have a latitude and longitude.  A couple of people complained that it was difficult to add the peak of “Mount St. Helens”, as well as trailheads and even one request to add a “delicious blackberry bush”.  Now you can add all of those, as long as you have the country, the place name and the lat/long.

We’ve made quite a few changes to the user experience to make it easier to add a new place. We also have a better way to combine duplicate Places if someone accidentally adds the same Place twice. Please point these duplicates out on Get Satisfaction, and we’ll get them combined.

Most importantly, the Shizzow beta API now supports the adding and editing of Places in the Shizzow database.  Nearly every external API, such as those provided by Google and Yahoo, allow you to retrieve any Place from their database, but they don’t let you add a new Place or edit an existing Place in their database.

We at Shizzow want to hand over the reigns to you, to let you customize any Place in our database. We call it our Open Places Database - its our version of a wiki, but for Places.

Better email shout notifications

Those of you who get email notifications may have already noticed that we’ve added some better descriptions in the subject line and the body of the email. They should now look something like this:

Subject: ryansnyder is at Aladdin’s Cafe - “I love baklava.”

“I love baklava.” - ryansnyder is at Aladdin’s Cafe.

ryansnyder: http://www.shizzow.com/ryansnyder

Aladdin’s Cafe, 6310 NE 33rd Ave., Portland OR 97211, United States: http://www.shizzow.com/places/m52Htz

Better information in friend notification emails

geekygirldawn is now listening to your shouts on Shizzow!

Profile information for geekygirldawn:
Name: Dawn Foster
From: Portland, OR, US
Bio: Community Manager, BarCamp/Ignite Event Organizer, Blogger, Podcaster, Vegan, and Technology Enthusiast

Find out more about geekygirldawn here:
http://shizzow.com/geekygirldawn

We also fixed some bugs, made a few improvements, optimized a couple of search queries and more. We reply on your help to know what we should be working on, so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!