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We noticed a few excited Tweets and other messages from those who noticed that your Shizzow IM shout notifications started mysteriously working again yesterday. As most of you know, we had been struggling to get IM notifications working with GTalk again after something changed on the Google side that was disrupting Shizzow IM notifications. Gtalk worked fine until last October, and in the meantime other non-Google XMPP IM accounts (like Jabber.org) continued to work over the past few months.

Don’t worry, it wasn’t the gremlins - here’s what happened. On our side, we were using Google Apps, including chat, within the Shizzow team on our shizzow.com email addresses. We also have an Openfire XMPP server running on shizzow.com to handle IM notifications for the Shizzow application. Apparently, back in October, Google decided that if somebady had more than one XMPP server running on a domain that it would consider the Google Apps server authoritative and block any others. Brilliant. After Ryan disabled our Google chat for shizzow, *poof* everything started working as expected again.

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!

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.