announcements

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.

We have Twitter integration to post your Shizzow shouts to Twitter, but the big change now is that you can easily import the people you are following on Twitter into Shizzow. Here are a few more details about how it works.

How to use the Twitter friend import:

• Go to your preferences page
• Click the Twitter link in the sidebar
• Activate the service by allowing Shizzow to access your Twitter information
• Click the Import your Twitter friends link
• For friends who are already on Shizzow, you can choose which ones you want to listen to.
• For friends who aren’t on Shizzow, you can invite them, which sends them a Twitter direct message with a request from you to join Shizzow.

What we do or do not do with your Twitter account:

• You never need to give us your Twitter password, we use oAuth to give you control over whether we can access your account.
• Shizzow will not automatically tweet from your account.
• Shizzow will not import all of your Twitter friends; you will need to manually select individual Twitter friends.
• For your Twitter friends who do not already have Shizzow accounts, Shizzow will allow you to send a direct message through Twitter to individually selected friends that you would like to invite to join Shizzow.
• After the friend import process, your account will be setup to automatically tweet your shouts through Twitter, but you can disable this at anytime by visiting the Twitter Preferences page. If you never want us to post your shouts from Twitter, simply disable your Twitter access after importing your Twitter friends.

We’re hoping this makes it easier for you to find your friends and use Shizzow. We would love to hear more about your experiences using the Twitter import on Get Satisfaction.

We also made a few other cool improvements in this latest release:

• Added favorites as a drop down menu on our mobile version (m.shizzow.com) without an extra refresh, and we added the search box to the bottom of the mobile page to make it even easier to shout from your web enabled phone.
• We made some other improvements to the signup process for new users to make it easier to get started on Shizzow.

As always, please let us know what improvements you would like to see in Shizzow. Most of our new features and bug reports come from you, so keep posting them to Get Satisfaction!

Reid Beels had the first Shizzow application prior to the release of our API using some CSS / Javascript wizardry to create a Fluid application, but it was never packaged up and released for the rest of us to use … until now.

Here’s a little more information from Reid’s blog post:

Soon after the launch of the Portland-based location tracking site, Shizzow, I put together client of sorts using a set of javascripts and CSS styles inside of a Fluid site-specific browser. I recently updated this code to work with the latest design revision of Shizzow and decided to take the opportunity to bundle them up for distribution.

Features

• Simplified site layout to work well in a compact window.
• Growl notifications for shouts.
• Automatically refreshes the homepage every minute, unless you’re typing a message.
• Automatically returns you to the homepage after a period of inactivity.

You can learn more and download the packaged version or the source code from Reid’s blog post.

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.

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.

Today we are announcing the public launch of Shizzow, a location-based friend finder where you can declare your location, and it will notify all of your friends so that they may come join you for a drink or a cup of coffee. Shizzow has been in private beta since August 2008 with invites open only to a limited number of people in Oregon, California, and Washington. Anyone in the United States can now sign up for Shizzow with no invite required.

We are also starting the public beta phase for our API. The Shizzow API has been in private beta since January 11th, and we’ve had a dozen developers kicking the tires and finding the bugs. More importantly, these developers have been writing new applications for Shizzow including applications for the iPhone, Android, websites, and more. Many of the applications are still in alpha and beta phases, but you can try them out by visiting our stay connected page.

The entire Shizzow team will be at SXSW March 13th - 17th, and we will have a few special features to help people use Shizzow to find your friends for meals, parties, sessions and more. Stay tuned to the Shizzow blog and Twitter account for more details about how to find us at SXSW.

If you live in Portland, you can come celebrate with us tomorrow at a special Beer and Blog pre-SXSW party or you can watch us on Strange Love Live on Friday at 10pm.

More Information about Shizzow

Shizzow is a location-based social service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction. In other words, we want you to get off your butt and away from the computer to meet your friends out in the real world where you can have experiences that don’t involve typing. Shizzow provides the technology for friends to share locations, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together. We don’t think that people need yet another social network, so Shizzow is focused on finding your friends, and we make it easy to get notifications of your friends’ locations via the website, IM, SMS, RSS feeds, etc. Don’t like how we do it? You may write a custom Shizzow-based application using our API.

Using Shizzow is fairly simple. Let’s say you are sitting in Stumptown Coffee Roasters having a cup of delicious coffee. After you get logged into the site, search for Stumptown, enter a message to let people know what you are doing, and post it to Shizzow. Assuming you have friends and people like you, one of those friends just might show up to join you. When you are ready to leave you might want to check out the link for nearby people to find other friends and decide where to go next. It’s a great way to find friends after work for a drink.

Our most frequently asked question is: “How is Shizzow different from other location-based applications?” Many of the current location-based services are attempting to be the Facebook of location.  Shizzow strives to be the Twitter of location, where the focus is solely on finding and hanging out with your friends. We keep things simple by putting the focus on spending time with your friends in the real world, and we leave the online social networking in the hands of the other services.

We hope to see you on Shizzow!