Articles by ryan

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now, with services like Foursquare and Gowalla pushing forward and securing funding, that the outlook for Shizzow and its future was dim.  We’ve had to admit to ourselves, after each of has suffered periods of burnout while attempting to juggle full-time jobs and this startup, that we simply cannot continue to push Shizzow forward with our current lack of resources.

We’ll be shutting down the company behind Shizzow, but Mark Wallaert will continue to run Shizzow as a side project to keep it in service for our loyal users.  He will be running it on his own, and as of now there are no plans for future development on the platform.  Dawn Foster and I don’t have the personal bandwidth to continue contributing to Shizzow, so we will be moving off of the project.

We named our product “Shizzow” because I’ve used that term for 10 forevers as a word to describe elation, and to me that word completely encapsulated the idea of spontaneously gathering with friends.  Shizzow was designed to be a friend finder, and we have met so many wonderful people with this service as the catalyst.

Before signing off, I must extend a heartfelt gratitude to the city of Portland for being our own personal cheerleaders through our beta and public launches.  The memories I will always treasure are seeing all of your tweets and hearing all of your conversations in which you evangelized Shizzow.

I’d like to give knucks to Scott Kevton and Ray King, who served as fabulous advisors; bows of gratitude to the publicity given by Rick Turoczy at the Silicon Florist, Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal at Strange Love Live, Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web, and Adam Duvander of MapScripting; pint glass clinks to Sue Brown, Matt Gifford, Reid Biels, Bill Jackson, John Nastos, Don Park, Sam Grover, Ken Baer and the other developers who pounded on the Shizzow API; and high fives to Sam Keen, Gus Torres, Carolynn Duncan, Aaron Hockley, Ryan Buchanan, and the countless number of others who have helped along the way.

Finally, we want to thank everyone who used Shizzow. It was a great ride, each of us learned so much during the process, and we look back on our time at Shizzow with fondness and no regrets. Thank you for all of the great times.

Cheers,
Ryan

We’ve added Google Gears support to both www.shizzow.com and m.shizzow.com to help auto-detect your location!

How does it work?  If you have Gears installed, you will be prompted to allow Shizzow to access information about your device.

Gears will attempt to auto-detect your location when you visit your Shizzow dashboard.  On Android phones it will use a combination of GPS, wi-fi triangulation and/or cell tower triangulation, while on most other devices it will use wi-fi triangulation.  If Gears can pinpoint your current latitude and longitude, it will hand that data to Shizzow, which will display a list of nearby places.

Visit gears.google.com to install Gears and to determine if Gears is installed on your device.

If Gears cannot tell precisely where you are at, it will typically place you in the center of the nearest major city.

As always, feedback is most welcome at GetSatisfaction.

Shizzow was lucky enough to sneak into the private beta for Twitter oAuth, and we’ve held back on releasing Twitter oAuth integration for all Shizzow users until Twitter gave the green light. Yesterday, Twitter announced that it has changed its oAuth status from closed beta to public beta. Today, we’re offering Twitter oAuth access for any public Shizzow user. Yay!

To active oAuth access, login and visit the External Preferences page. Only shouts with messages will be transmitted to Twitter, and your tweets will resemble this format, “ZOMG! I love this cappuccino!! - at Stumptown Coffee Roasters http://shz.me/a1b2″

We are still ironing out a few kinks with oAuth activation, which currently only works in the Firefox browser. Once activated, you may use Shizzow in any browser. If you run into any problems, please let us know.

Update 1: Twitter fixed a bug on its end so that activation will now work in Internet Explorer.

Update 2: We fixed the bug that prevented Twitter oAuth activation via Safari.  Activation should now work fine in any browser.

The Shizzow team is will be in Austin for SxSW! If you happen to be at SxSW, make sure you say hi to Dawn, Mark and myself (Ryan). We’d love to hear about how you use Shizzow and to tell you a little more about ourselves. Here are a few places we know we’ll be:

Dawn, our community manager, will be speaking on a the panel at Post Standards: Creating Open Source. This will be on Sunday, March 15th at 3:30pm in Room Hilton C.

The Shizzow team is planning to be at BarCampAustin 4 most of Saturday.

You can also listen to our shouts on Shizzow and track us down at one of the many parties and other meetups at SxSW.

If you need to quickly find the place you’re at, you can hit any of the following quicklinks to places at SXSW:

• http://www.shizzow.com/sxsw
• http://m.shizzow.com/sxsw

And if you need to find which party the other Shizzow users are currently at, make sure you check out Shizzeeps, which is a web application built by @crunchysue using the Shizzow API.

Last week we opened up Shizzow to allow anyone in the United States to join Shizzow. Today we’re excited to share some Shizzow love with our friends outside the United States.

Shizzow now supports use in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

And yes, we definitely plan on supporting Shizzow use in every country in the very near future, but we need to take one step at a time.

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!

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’ve noticed a little bit of confusion around the term “Shout” on Shizzow, so I wanted to take a little time to clarify the action and talk about how that term came to be.

We use the term “Shout” to signify the declaration of your location on Shizzow. The basic idea is that when you find the Place that you are currently at on Shizzow, say Green Dragon, you will Shout or Shout Out (we Shizzowers jokingly call it a Shizzout) to all of your friends that you are currently at Green Dragon. All of the friends who are “Listening” to you, are really listening specifically for your Shouts through Shizzow and will be notified of your current location every time that you shout.  In a data sense, a Shout connects a Person to a Place at a specific time, so make sure you navigate to the place page for your current location, or locate your current location in the search results, before clicking Shout, otherwise you’ll Shout from a Place that you’re really not at.

Back when we first began development, we had a hard time finding verbs to signify the actions that took place on Shizzow. We instinctively began using Twitter’s “follow” vocabulary, but we quickly found that to be a really creepy verb to use when discussing people and their locations. We also explored using Facebook’s “friend” vocabulary, but when we began talking privacy, friending a person who may not necessarily want to be your friend back really starts to create an awkward user story. So, when we started playing with the term “Shout”, it seemed like a stalker-free term that would make a really good fit for declaring one’s location.

We’re currently looking at ways to clarify the term and make the user exprience a bit more friendly when you first sign up with Shizzow. If you have any ideas for us, please let us know through Get Satisfaction.

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