api

The Beer Signal iPhone app just hit the iTunes store, so I decided to do a quick interview with the developer, Ken Baer, to learn more about how it uses Shizzow to help you drink beer with friends. I think it’s the first Shizzow integrated application on the iTunes store?

Ken Baer, Taplister’s iPhone App Guru, is a Portland native and long time Tech, Trek, and Beer Geek. He spent about 20 years writing 3D animation software (Hash Inc’s Animation:Master) on the Amiga, Mac, and PC, and worked on OMSI’s Star Trek Federation Science exhibit in the early 90’s. He is actively involved in the local animation scene through ASIFA-Portland, and spent some time doing scuba and fencing. Ken is an active Mac developer, and has jumped into iPhone development with both feet. He is excited about his work on iPhone apps for Taplister, and is committed to making very cool apps for craft beer fans everywhere.

Dawn: Can you start by telling us a little bit about Taplister and Beer Signal?

Ken: Taplister is a web site dedicated to providing up to date information about what craft beers are on tap around Portland. The site has a bot that gathers information via Twitter using our #ontappdx hash tag. So, the data is provided by not only the pubs around town, but also the patrons. Anyone that visits some of the websites for these pubs knows that if they list what beers they have on tap, that information is often out of date. That’s because pubs often don’t have time to update their web sites as often as would like. By getting patrons and beer fans into the act, we can have a database that is a lot more helpful.

So, on Taplister.com, you can search for a beer and see who’s serving it in Portland. You can also see what’s on tap at your favorite bar or pub. Pubs that sign up with us also have the option of having a “PubCam” installed, which shows a live image of their on tap board. It doesn’t get more up to date than that!

Beer Signal is an iPhone app that uses the Taplister engine. The app helps you find a pub, see what they have on tap, and invite your friends to join you. You start by selecting a pub from the Taplister database. You can see their active beer list, the live pubcam (if they have one), and information like their location (with a map), hours, happy hours, and how many taps they have. Then choose what friends you want to invite. You build a list of local, beer drinking friends and enter their Twitter names. The app keeps this list and allows you to select who you want to invite. If you are at the pub now, you can send the invite with Shizzow or Twitter. If you are planning a meetup, you can set the time and date, and send the invites out all once as Twitter direct messages. The app also allows you to tweet what beer you are drinking and if it is off tap. And finally, you have full access to the mobile Taplister site in the app, including searching for a specific beer.

Dawn: How did you get the idea to start this project?

Ken: I met Kerry Finsand at my first Beer and Blog. I literally walked into East Burn (coincidentally our first client), sat down in the last empty chair, introduced myself to the guy next to me, who was Kerry, and started talking about beer and the iPhone. Kerry and Scott Wray had been working on the idea for the web site for a couple months I think. They also hooked up with Kevin Scaldeferri who’s doing the web server and the bot. Scott worked with Joe Mendonca on designing the web site. Ezra Johnson-Greenough a.k.a Samurai Artist has been doing a series of interviews with brewers that’s on the site. And recently, we’ve been working with Derek Arent on logos and branding. All of us are big craft beer fans. This project is all about the beer. I wanted to make an iPhone app for it that really leveraged some of the power of the device. I thought it would be cool to make it easy to invite your friends out for beer.

Dawn: Why did you decide to integrate with Shizzow?

Ken: It was such a natural connection. I’d heard about Shizzow at a Lunch 2.0 I went to early in the year, but didn’t really hear the details of what it was about. So, while I was writing code for Beer Signal, I took a break and did a quick search to satisfy my curiosity about what Shizzow was. It was exactly what I wanted to do. Beer Signal is about finding pubs, discovering great beer, and getting together with friends so you can enjoy it together. We want people to spend more time socializing in person, and not just online. We also want to support our local drinking spots, and bring them the business they need in this tough economy. It seems to me that Shizzow is all about that. It also didn’t hurt meeting the people behind Shizzow and being in the same city. If we can help them succeed in our own little way, all the better.

Dawn: Where can people go to learn more about Taplister and Beer Signal and what plans do you have for future improvements?

Ken: Taplister.com is the place to be for the latest on what’s pouring in Portland. There’s a search right on the front page to search for beers using our exclusive beer search engine. Also, the Taplister.com site will autodetect if are on a mobile device and bring up the mobile version of the site.

You can go to BeerSignal.com to learn more about the app, and read the documentation. Beer Signal is currently available on Apple’s iTunes App Store.

There’s a lot we want to do in the future. This is just phase 1. Down the road we want to incorporate beer descriptions, reviews, and user ratings. We also want to work more with brewers and distributors, and be able to collect valuable information for them about what people are drinking and what kinds of beers people are asking about. We also want to expand to other cities. Portland has an amazing craft beer culture. But, it seems to be spreading to other cities, and we want to be there too. One thing I’m interested in developing is more visual ways brewers and users can define a beer’s flavor profile, and then be able to search on that so users can discover new beers that they would likely enjoy.

But, this all begins with everyone using the #ontappdx hash tag, and helping us maintain the best beer list anywhere!

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!

While most of our efforts recently have been focused on back end improvements and the API, we did find time for a few enhancements and fixes that we think you will like. As always, this is how we prove that we really do read all of the stuff you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Your shouts on the dashboard

By popular request, we have added your shouts to the main dashboard of your home page. Several people asked for this feature as a way to show context between the timing of your shouts and others, and now you have it!

Moving people pages

We’ve moved the people page URLs from shizzow.com/geekygirldawn to shizzow.com/people/geekygirldawn to be consistent with other page formats. We do have redirects in place, of course, but it would be great if you could take a few minutes to update any bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.

Now with more altitude

Yes, it really does say altitude and not attitude (although we have plenty of that, too). We now have lat / long and altitude. We’re curious to see how people use it, but we’re thinking about how it would apply to skyscrapers, hiking, and more.  I can’t wait to see the first application using altitude!

Beta API

We’re continuing to make many changes to the API as a result of the feedback we’re getting from our beta testers. We might even be able to open it up to more people soon.

We also fixed a few random bugs along the way. Remember, we can’t change things that we don’t know you want, so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!

I’ve been seeing more and more articles about location applications and interesting uses of GPS technologies lately, and I really think that 2009 will be the year that many of these applications move into the mainstream. People are moving onto smarter phones, like the iPhone and Android devices, that use GPS data seamlessly in applications.

I also ran across an interesting article from Wired this morning: Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location. It looks at a bunch of less well known applications used on phones to locate police traps, wake you from a nap at your train stop, play location games, adjust phone settings based on location, and more. I was a little sad not to see IceCondor on the list, but the Wired article still covered some interesting applications.

Now that we have a beta version of the Shizzow API out, I am anxious to see how people use location data, GPS, and other technologies in applications that interface with Shizzow.

It’s been a long time since our last Tweaks of the ‘Week’ post. With all of the refactoring happening in preparation for the Shizzow API, we held off on deploying anything new on the old code. While the API beta stole most of the thunder during our update this weekend, you might have noticed that we also snuck in a few cool improvements. Again, this is just more proof that we actually read all of the stuff you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Staying Connected

We added some information in the sidebar about how to stay connected to Shizzow with SMS, IM and Apps. We’ve found that new users (and some who have been around a while) don’t realize how many ways there are to keep up with your friends on Shizzow in addition to the web interface. This is also where we will be adding information about new applications as people build them with the new beta API.

More Entries in our RSS Feeds

OK, this change came mostly from my complaints. Our original RSS feeds had only 10 elements, and I wanted to do some filtering with Yahoo Pipes, but items kept rolling out of the feed too quickly. I convinced Ryan to up the RSS feeds to have 25 items.

Add to Favorites on m.shizzow.com

We had a little bug on m.shizzow.com that was preventing people from adding favorites using the mobile phone interface. We fixed this bug as part of the last update.

Beta API

As I mentioned earlier, we also rolled out a private beta for the Shizzow API, and we have several people already starting to work on applications. We even had our first API shout from an Android phone last night. If you are interested in doing development with the beta API, you can email dawn at shizzow.com to get an invite. Another way to get involved is by attending the Shizzow Developers Meetup on Thursday.

Since the refactoring for the API resulted in code changes across most areas of Shizzow, this release may have introduced a few more bugs. 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!

Most of you already know that we have been working hard on getting the API ready for people to use. Unfortunately, this also resulted in rewriting and refactoring big chunks of the existing Shizzow code to get it ready for the API.

Tomorrow, Sunday, January 10th we will be taking the site down at 1pm to deploy a bunch of changes. Plan for Shizzow to be down from 1pm - 2pm; however, if all goes well, the downtime will be much shorter. Because so much of the code changed, we’d be surprised if we didn’t introduce a few new bugs for you to find. Think of it as a Shizzow hide and seek project this week. Those bugs are hiding out there somewhere, and your mission is to find them!

Here’s what we need from you:

• As you use Shizzow on Sunday and Monday, please find a few of those hidden bugs and log the issues for us in Get Satisfaction.
• We will be opening the API up to a few beta testers soon. Please contact me (dawn at Shizzow.com) or leave a comment on this post if you want to participate in the private beta for the API by building an app using the Shizzow API. We have a Shizzow Dev Google Group that we’re using for developer collaboration, and we would love to have a couple more people looking at the API beta.