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!
