Articles by dawn

Michael Calore talked about how location-based information is becoming a requirement for web applications in a recent Wired article:

In 2008, location-based information ceased being a fancy add-on and instead became a requirement of any serious, successful web service.

Hit a button on your laptop or phone to tell a web service where you are, and it tells you what restaurants are close by, where the new Bond movie is playing (and when, and if there are tickets left), and which of your friends are within shouting distance if you need a date.

(Quoted from Wired News)

Mobile devices with GPS, Geode, and location applications have become more prolific in 2008, and we expect this trend to continue in 2009 making location-based services even more important.

We have big plans for Shizzow in 2009 to take advantage of this trend. We’ve been pretty quiet in December, but only because we have been hard at work behind the scenes. The API is being completed, and code is being refactored to make room for the API, which should be ready for beta testers in the next week or so.  We have plenty of ideas for applications that will use the API to make it easier to shout from your iPhone / desktop and ideas for integrations with other applications.

Leave a comment here if you are interested in using the API to develop applications for Shizzow.

Those of us here in Portland probably already know the mysterious and elusive Rick Turoczy who hides within the Silicon Florist. Last night he was on the KGW Hot Box where he managed to mention just about every cool project in Portland in just over 5 minutes.

He talked about:

• User Groups
• Beer and Blog
• Legion of Tech
• Shizzow (yay!)
• Calagator
• Vidoop
• Janrain
• Subatomic Studios, Fieldrunners

The video is definitely worth the 5 minutes of your time to watch it.

We’ve realized that not everyone knows the full power of the amazing Shizzow shouts search. We have a customized search that can be used to find people with certain characteristics, and we’ve focused on making it easy to find shouts from people who are similar to you (yes, you).

The tags are pre-populated with the tags from your profile, but you can also click the ‘+’ sign next to ‘tagged’ to get a custom search box where you can enter additional tags. You can find people in places with a specified distance from your current location. This is a great way to learn more about people on Shizzow with common interests who tend to hang out near you. As a bonus, most of these custom shout searches have RSS feeds associated with them.

Want to just find people with similar interests to follow?

We also have a great people search.

What you need to do

However, these searches work best when people remember to tag themselves! Take a look at your profile page now (yes, right now!), and think about whether or not your current tags reflect your interests. Do you have enough tags? Do you have the right tags? Did you add a single random tag when you originally created your profile before you knew how they were used?

You can add and remove tags at any time by going to Preferences -> tags from your Shizzow home page.

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs recently. As always, these enhancements are proof that we really do read all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

RSS Feeds

We added a bunch of RSS feeds, which makes me enormously happy (Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an RSS junkie). You can get to these feeds from the customized search, and we have feeds for most searches. You can get feeds for people near a place, with certain tags, and more.

Search

We made a few improvements and fixed a few bugs in our search functionality. We’re assuming you didn’t notice those bugs, since they were never posted on Get Satisfaction. So forget I mentioned anything, and maybe search will just magically work better for you this week.

Invitations

Ryan was kind enough to add some admin functionality to give me better visibility into the people sending the most invites along with the number of used invitations and remaining invitations for each person. Some people haven’t been inviting their friends. Now, I know who you are …

As usual, we fixed a few other bugs and made some additional enhancements. We can only fix the issues that we know about (our telepathic abilities are severely limited), so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

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.

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.

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.

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.

We wanted to let you know about a few enhancements that we pushed out this week. This is our way of showing you we care.

The Big Stuff

• A new home. Last weekend, we moved Shizzow onto a new server with more room for our baby to grow up. It’s a dedicated server with redundant data pipes, and we’ve already noticed a massive performance boost.
• Shout time improvements. Unless you have a bunch of people listening to your shouts, this probably wasn’t much of an issue for you. For some of us, it was taking way too many seconds for the page to refresh after shouting. We tracked the issue down to the IM notifications, and optimized them so that they will work much more quickly and efficiently.
• People search now finding more people. Many of you noticed that our people search wasn’t doing a very good job of finding people. We made some tweaks, and now it is doing a much better job of actually finding people on the site.

Minor stuff that you might care about

• Lat/Long issues with moving markers have been resolved.
• Added a reminder that all places are public to the add a new place page
• People with private accounts can now page through multiple pages of pending requests
• Fixed an issue with Firebug running while using Shizzow
• Removed an extraneous space in the shout message box

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

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the importance of context in applications dealing with location. Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist at Intel, mentioned something similar in her recent keynote at OSCON. She said, “adding data is not the same as adding context.” The following snippet from an Intel blog post outlines the idea in a little more detail.

It was a huge accomplishment to simply be able to sense location electronically. Now that we’ve done it, it is important to figure out the real context of ‘context awareness’—who needs to communicate what to whom. This is not a matter of simply adding more datapoints but creating occasions for human interpretation and interaction. (Quoted from Research@Intel)

In my experience, it seems like too many applications focus on either the location (data) or the context without a really great tie between the two.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point:

I publish that I am at the Peruvian restaurant, Andina. Does this mean that I’m having a romantic dinner with my sweetheart, or am I in the bar wishing someone would join me for a drink? I would want my friends to treat each of these two scenarios differently. While the location is the same, the intent and the context are very different. This is what I think of as location without context.

What about a tweet that says, “I’m at Urban Grind. Anyone want to join me for a work session?” This is a little more clear, but can be ambiguous without a precise location. Do you know if I am at the Urban Grind Coffeehouse in Portland’s Pearl District or the one in NE Portland? This is an example of context without location.

Why does this even matter?

The sweet spot for bringing people together in more meaningful ways is precise location with context for what you are doing at that location. This gives people an excuse to get together for spontaneous gathering, which is something that the Portland technology community does frequently. We’ve organized ad hoc co-working sessions, coffee, lunches, waffleups, happy hours, drunk geeking, and more. Having an easy way to provide your friends with a location and some context about what to do with that information is what makes location applications so powerful.

The team at Shizzow was honored to be invited to appear on the Strange Love Live podcast last Friday night with Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. We talked about the history of Shizzow, the name, how people are using it, our plans for the future and more.

I encourage you to listen to the podcast, download it or subscribe to their feed if you want to hear more episodes of Strange Love Live. A huge thank you to Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal for having us on the show, and thanks to our fans who participated in the studio audience and in the chat during the live recording!

We wanted to let everyone know that we are preparing for some maintenance on Saturday at 2:00pm. If all goes well, there should only be 15 - 30 minutes of downtime.

We have been running Shizzow in a shared environment along with a couple of other web sites, and now that our baby is growing up, it requires a little more room to grow. We’re moving Shizzow onto a dedicated environment where our testing so far is showing some improved performance and faster response times. It will also help to avoid issues like the one last Friday where Shizzow was down for about 15 minutes due to an issue with one of the other websites on the server consuming more than its fair share of system resources.

Most of the preparation for the move has already been completed. We’ll need to put the site on the old server into maintenance mode, pull a final copy of the db, and then wait about 10 minutes for DNS propagation. If you see the down for maintenance screen, just wait about 15 minutes and try again. Please let us know as soon as possible if you see any strange behavior over the weekend, and log any issues on Get Satisfaction.

We will use the Twitter account for any last minute updates, reminders, or issues encountered during the move.

We are very excited to be the featured guests on this week’s Strange Love Live podcast with Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal.

At least two (maybe three) of us will be on the podcast: Dawn, Sam and possibly Mark. We’ll be talking about Shizzow and whatever else comes to mind. Recording starts at 10pm on Friday, August 22nd. You can listen to the show live or tune in later for the podcast version. All of the details about how to watch are on the Strange Love Live blog. I hope you’ll tune in to listen!

Right now we’re in private beta, and we’re only giving invites to the cool kids. I’m afraid that you weren’t cool enough to make the cut. I’m kidding, I’m kidding!

The big change today is that we are also issuing invites to existing users. The people who have been using Shizzow during week 1 of the private beta will now have a couple of invites that they can use to invite other friends. We are still asking everyone to limit the invitations to people in the Portland Metro area (remember that Shizzow is only valuable when you can find other people nearby to hang out with). We will do some careful scalability testing while people hand out these additional invites to decide how we want to proceed with future invites. If you live near Portland and don’t have an invite yet, you can hit up a friend to get one.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind right now about Shizzow:

• We are bootstrapped with no outside funding or revenue sources, so we can’t throw more servers at Shizzow if we overload it with too many people.
• It is currently a side project. In other words, we all have full-time jobs that pay the rent, so we can’t always devote as much time as we would like to Shizzow

We had to make a few hard choices about how we wanted to run the beta.

• Portland-only: We are limiting beta invites to people residing in Portland, Oregon for the first wave of the private beta. Since Shizzow is all about using technology to help people connect and meet up in the real world, physical location is very relevant to how people use the site. We needed to build a critical mass of people in one location, and for selfish reasons, we decided to select Portland. We will open it up to people in other locations soon.
• Few Participants: We don’t want to be the next Twitter fail whale parody site. We are starting with a small number of members ~300 and then plan to gradually add a few more people at a time to test our scalability. The initial set of members was selected out of the people that we see out and about getting together with others on a regular basis at a variety of local Portland meet-ups.

Next steps for the Shizzow Beta:

• A bunch of scalability testing
• Begin inviting more Portland peeps
• Expand focus to a couple more cities
• Get out of beta, and open it up to the anyone who wants to participate

We’re not evil monsters. If all of your friends are using Shizzow, and you were somehow missed on the invite list, you can enter the appeal process (2 forms of ID, stack of paperwork, first born, etc.) OK, kidding again; lighten up people. Seriously, just find me at one of the many local Portland events that I attend or email me, and tell me your story. I will get you an invite as soon I can. Your other option is to find a friend who has a few invites left and convince them that you are cool enough to join Shizzow.

Today is a busy day for Shizzow. If you want to come hang out with us, you can find us at 2 separate meetups and a maybe a third.

All four of us plan to be at the Silicon Florist Lunch 2.0 and Birthday Extravaganza today handing out invites for anyone who didn’t get an invite yet.
Wednesday, August 13
12:00pm - 2:00pm
CubeSpace
622 SE Grand Ave

The four of us would also love to have you join us for a happy hour Shizzup at the Green Dragon tonight from 5pm - 7pm. Nothing formal. We just wanted to celebrate having Shizzow available to more users, and a celebration is always more fun with a bunch of people.
Wednesday, August 13
5pm - 7pm
Green Dragon
928 SE 9th Ave

I will also be going straight from the Green Dragon to the Lucky Lab for our monthly Werewolf games. New players are welcome if anyone wants to attend.

Like I said, it will be a busy day for Shizzow. We may even try to fix some bugs and send out a few more invites. Stability is looking really good, so we can issue a few more invites. Please send me an email (dawn at shizzow.com) or find one of us at these events, and we’ll hook you up with an invite.

We’ve been getting a few questions about how Shizzow is different from our competitors. I don’t want to turn this into a competitor bashing session, so I’ll just focus on what we think we do really well.

Shizzow is laser-focused on helping people find and meet up with their friends in the real world. We don’t worry about trying to replace Twitter, Flickr, or other services; we just try to find ways for people to connect for dinner, drinks, work sessions, and more. Here are a few specific ways that we accomplish this single mission:

Focus on places, not addresses

On Shizzow, we focus on places. Broadcasting my location as Portland, OR doesn’t really help my friends find me to hang out. My close friends probably know that I am in Portland, so Shizzow focuses on a specific place, Urban Grind Coffeehouse for example. Addresses are also problematic, since our human brains don’t usually do a reverse lookup from address to location. I may know exactly where the Green Dragon is located, but when I see that Sam is at 928 SE 9th Ave my puny human brain may not associate that address with the Green Dragon. Shizzow, on the other hand, alerts me with a message that “sam shouted from the Green Dragon”.

You supply the place name, and we find the address along with other important information for you. Tags are just one piece of information displayed on the place page, and we also encourage you to add additional tags to these places. Any user can add a tag to a place, which is then shared by all of the other users to make it easy to find somewhere nearby with wifi, coffee, beer, or whatever your passion is.

Find people nearby

My favorite feature, and the one that I find the most valuable, is the ability to see people who are currently at places near your location, which you can view as a list or on a map. While sitting here at the Green Dragon, I can see people who are at work nearby or at other pubs in the area. It’s a great way to find and meet up with friends in the area.

Context is important

It seems like too many applications focus on either the location (data) or the context without a really great tie between the two. I publish that I am at the Peruvian restaurant, Andina. Does this mean that I’m having a romantic dinner with my sweetheart, or am I in the bar wishing someone would join me for a drink? We give people the option to shout with a message to give their friends some additional context about what they are doing at any given location. I’ll have a post with more details on this topic of location vs. context soon.

It’s all about the people

Shizzow is about 2 things: places (which we already talked about) and people. Again, our focus is on connecting people with each other in physical places, so we make sure that we make it easy to find your friends. Most areas of the site allow you to separately view your friends (those you are listening to) and also view everyone.

We’re always open to your thoughts on how we can make Shizzow a better service and help you connect with your friends. Let us know what ideas you might have at Get Satisfaction.

UPDATE 8/15/08:

Audrey Eschright, a Portlander and location guru, does a very nice job of comparing a bunch of location services in a recent blog post: Location Sharing Options. As a bonus, since she isn’t affiliated with Shizzow other than being in the private beta program, she can be objective about the differences.

On Wednesday, August 13th at 5pm at the Green Dragon, we are holding our first of what we hope to be many Shizzups.

If you like Shizzow, you can come buy us a drink to celebrate. If you don’t have an invite yet, show up before people buy us too many drinks, and we’ll set you up with an invite to the service.

You can RSVP on Upcoming to attend.

On Monday, we will be making an announcement about the private beta for Shizzow! A couple hundred lucky Portlanders will receive invites to try Shizzow. Keep an eye on this blog for more details next week.

You can also follow us on Twitter for additional updates from Shizzow.