search

We’ve realized that not everyone knows the full power of the amazing Shizzow shouts search. We have a customized search that can be used to find people with certain characteristics, and we’ve focused on making it easy to find shouts from people who are similar to you (yes, you).

The tags are pre-populated with the tags from your profile, but you can also click the ‘+’ sign next to ‘tagged’ to get a custom search box where you can enter additional tags. You can find people in places with a specified distance from your current location. This is a great way to learn more about people on Shizzow with common interests who tend to hang out near you. As a bonus, most of these custom shout searches have RSS feeds associated with them.

Want to just find people with similar interests to follow?

We also have a great people search.

What you need to do

However, these searches work best when people remember to tag themselves! Take a look at your profile page now (yes, right now!), and think about whether or not your current tags reflect your interests. Do you have enough tags? Do you have the right tags? Did you add a single random tag when you originally created your profile before you knew how they were used?

You can add and remove tags at any time by going to Preferences -> tags from your Shizzow home page.

We made some improvements and fixed a few bugs recently. As always, these enhancements are proof that we really do read all of the suggestions you send us through Get Satisfaction.

RSS Feeds

We added a bunch of RSS feeds, which makes me enormously happy (Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an RSS junkie). You can get to these feeds from the customized search, and we have feeds for most searches. You can get feeds for people near a place, with certain tags, and more.

Search

We made a few improvements and fixed a few bugs in our search functionality. We’re assuming you didn’t notice those bugs, since they were never posted on Get Satisfaction. So forget I mentioned anything, and maybe search will just magically work better for you this week.

Invitations

Ryan was kind enough to add some admin functionality to give me better visibility into the people sending the most invites along with the number of used invitations and remaining invitations for each person. Some people haven’t been inviting their friends. Now, I know who you are …

As usual, we fixed a few other bugs and made some additional enhancements. 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!

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!

We wanted to let you know about a few enhancements that we pushed out this week. This is our way of showing you we care.

The Big Stuff

• A new home. Last weekend, we moved Shizzow onto a new server with more room for our baby to grow up. It’s a dedicated server with redundant data pipes, and we’ve already noticed a massive performance boost.
• Shout time improvements. Unless you have a bunch of people listening to your shouts, this probably wasn’t much of an issue for you. For some of us, it was taking way too many seconds for the page to refresh after shouting. We tracked the issue down to the IM notifications, and optimized them so that they will work much more quickly and efficiently.
• People search now finding more people. Many of you noticed that our people search wasn’t doing a very good job of finding people. We made some tweaks, and now it is doing a much better job of actually finding people on the site.

Minor stuff that you might care about

• Lat/Long issues with moving markers have been resolved.
• Added a reminder that all places are public to the add a new place page
• People with private accounts can now page through multiple pages of pending requests
• Fixed an issue with Firebug running while using Shizzow
• Removed an extraneous space in the shout message box

As always, keep logging those issues and suggestions for improvements in Get Satisfaction, and we’ll keep making Shizzow work better for you!