shizzow

Those of us here in Portland probably already know the mysterious and elusive Rick Turoczy who hides within the Silicon Florist. Last night he was on the KGW Hot Box where he managed to mention just about every cool project in Portland in just over 5 minutes.

He talked about:

• User Groups
• Beer and Blog
• Legion of Tech
• Shizzow (yay!)
• Calagator
• Vidoop
• Janrain
• Subatomic Studios, Fieldrunners

The video is definitely worth the 5 minutes of your time to watch it.

As I mentioned yesterday, the California expansion went so well that we have decided to open it up to Seattle, too. We’re getting a bunch of invite requests, but the servers have been rock solid, so we wanted to continue our plans for world domination (or at least the west coast of the U.S.)

In a similar fashion, here is how you can help:

• If you live in Washington State and would like an invite, please request one! I’ll be sending them out in batches a few times per day.
• If you are already using Shizzow, please send a few invites to your Washington friends and family.
• If you run out of invites and need more, you can petition the Shizzow Invite Fairy using our contact form. I promise that the Shizzow Invite Fairy monitors the contact us emails.
• Send us feedback! If you find any bugs or just want to send us some suggestions for feedback, please submit all feedback to our Get Satisfaction account.

We’re still deciding on the next expansion city. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

Wow, we’ve had a great response to the California expansion! We continue to send more invites and get more users signed up for Shizzow. We also had some great coverage of the launch in case you missed any of it.

• ReadWriteWeb: Simple, Social Friend Finder Shizzow Opens to California
• Webmonkey: Shout Out Your Whereabouts With Shizzow
• Webmonkey: Side Project to Startup: Shizzow Q&A
• Silicon Florist: Shizzow starts shouting in the Bay Area
• Adam DuVander: Create Some Ground Rules
• Greg Hughes: Shizzow grows up, expands into California
• Fast Wonder: Shizzow: Adding the Bay Area and Bootstrapping
• Techmeme

The initial expansion went so well that we’ll be expanding into other areas very soon with Seattle (and other cities in Washington) next on the agenda, so stay tuned for that announcement. If you live in Washington, please go ahead and request an invite now. We’ll be sending them out soon.

Some of you may know Kurt Sussman (aka @neophiliac) who can often be identified by his barefoot shoes, which he wears most of the time (he claims that people remember the shoes better than they remember him). We may never know the reason, but I am told that he was not wearing them in his moment of glory on that fateful day, Thursday, November 13th, when Kurt caught a ride back from the Thursday shizzup/tweetup breakfast with J-P Voilleque (aka @lawduck), who went to UGNW to work. Kurt picked up his laptop and joined him to finish setting up an email server for a client. He ordered a cup of coffee instead of his usual dry double cappucino. Bram Pitoyo came in and said hi, but sat with a potential client and missed the momentous occasion.

Luckily Kurt remembered to shout his location. Little did he know that he would soon become famous. What Kurt didn’t realize was that his innocent shout at the Urban Grind was the 10,000th shout on Shizzow - a momentous occasion and one for the history books. OK, maybe I’m overstating it just a teeny bit. While it probably won’t make it into the history books, we did talk about it on Twitter and are now talking about it here in this blog post.

If you don’t already know Kurt, you can also find him at this weekend’s Startup Workout event, which he organizes and hopes to turn into a regular event. He’s also been helping us expand Shizzow into Hawaii, where he lived for a couple of years. Now, if only I could turn that into a “business trip” involving fruity cocktails on the beach …

Since we know everyone will be busy and on the go this weekend geeking out at WhereCampPDX, we thought that you would want to be able to shout from your cell phone. Well, here we go - Shizzow now supports shouting and notifications via SMS!

There are a few things you should know first:

1. This is a beta. We’ve tested it as much as we can, but we need for you to try it out and let us know if you find any issues or have suggestions for how we can make it better. Until I perfect that mind reading device I’ve been working on in my garage, we can’t fix the bugs that you forget to tell us about! Log all of your suggestions on our Get Satisfaction page.
2. Configuration. Before you run outside to shout from your cell phone, you will need to spend a few minutes on the computer to configure Shizzow to recognize your phone. You can also choose to get notifications via SMS, but choose this option carefully based on the number of people you listen to and your text messaging plan. You can find all of the configuration instructions on our new Using SMS page.
3. Favorites and Nicknames. For the moment, Shizzow only allows you to Shout from your favorite places using nicknames, so you will need to make sure that your favorite places have nicknames. You’ll also want to add places as favorites with nicknames if you plan to shout from them. We won’t always have this limitation, but we wanted to release SMS support quickly with a simple command structure to start getting feedback before we try to make it more feature rich.
4. Memorization and Pop Quiz. OK, there won’t really be a pop quiz, but you will need to memorize some simple commands (or print out a cheat sheet). We’ve kept things as simple as possible with commands like #s for shout and #m for message. You will also notice that since we are bootstrapped (aka we have no money), we are using a shared SMS code, so all of your commands will need to start with “shzow”. All of the commands and examples can be found on our Using SMS page.

The Using SMS page has instructions with details about how to complete all of the steps listed above, so you will want to start there to get up and running with SMS. Most importantly, we want you to have fun with this new feature and let us know how we can make it better.

We released a couple of new things yesterday. As always, this our way of proving that we like you and actually listen to all of that feedback you post on Get Satisfaction.

Nearby People on the Place Page

Several people asked us to include a link to the nearby people right on the place page. You can already get a list of nearby people for your existing location or a list of people currently at a place, but now you can also see who else is near a place before you decide to go there.

Better Previous / Next Links

People with mouse coordination challenges were complaining about how our previous / next links on the search page were teeny, tiny links to ‘>>’. We’ve expanded it out so that the link also includes the Previous / Next text.

We also made a few minor changes to m.shizzow.com and a few bug fixes this week.

What?!? Only a couple of changes this week?

Yes, we are slackers. Or maybe, just maybe, we are working very hard to give you SMS support for shouting, and it is taking up most of our development time.

As always, keep your feedback coming at us on Get Satisfaction.

Now that the RSS feeds for Shizzow are public, we would love to have a widget that takes an RSS feed from Shizzow and makes it look awesome in a blog sidebar. Yes, yes, we know this isn’t hard to do, but would you rather have us spend an hour on a widget or spend an hour working on SMS support and m.shizzow.com?

So here’s the deal:

• Email the code for your widget and a URL where we can see it in action to dawn at shizzow.com with the subject: “awesome contest entry” before midnight on 9/13.
• The Shizzow team will make an entirely subjective judgment call to pick the one we like the most.
• We will buy the winner a drink at Beer and Blog or a similar tech event here in Portland.

We don’t really know exactly what we want, so there are no specs for the widget. Use your best judgment to come up with something cool.

We will post the code for the widget on the Shizzow site for anyone to use while giving credit to the original author. In other words, you are doing this for fame and glory.

We are very excited to be the featured guests on this week’s Strange Love Live podcast with Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal.

At least two (maybe three) of us will be on the podcast: Dawn, Sam and possibly Mark. We’ll be talking about Shizzow and whatever else comes to mind. Recording starts at 10pm on Friday, August 22nd. You can listen to the show live or tune in later for the podcast version. All of the details about how to watch are on the Strange Love Live blog. I hope you’ll tune in to listen!

Right now we’re in private beta, and we’re only giving invites to the cool kids. I’m afraid that you weren’t cool enough to make the cut. I’m kidding, I’m kidding!

The big change today is that we are also issuing invites to existing users. The people who have been using Shizzow during week 1 of the private beta will now have a couple of invites that they can use to invite other friends. We are still asking everyone to limit the invitations to people in the Portland Metro area (remember that Shizzow is only valuable when you can find other people nearby to hang out with). We will do some careful scalability testing while people hand out these additional invites to decide how we want to proceed with future invites. If you live near Portland and don’t have an invite yet, you can hit up a friend to get one.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind right now about Shizzow:

• We are bootstrapped with no outside funding or revenue sources, so we can’t throw more servers at Shizzow if we overload it with too many people.
• It is currently a side project. In other words, we all have full-time jobs that pay the rent, so we can’t always devote as much time as we would like to Shizzow

We had to make a few hard choices about how we wanted to run the beta.

• Portland-only: We are limiting beta invites to people residing in Portland, Oregon for the first wave of the private beta. Since Shizzow is all about using technology to help people connect and meet up in the real world, physical location is very relevant to how people use the site. We needed to build a critical mass of people in one location, and for selfish reasons, we decided to select Portland. We will open it up to people in other locations soon.
• Few Participants: We don’t want to be the next Twitter fail whale parody site. We are starting with a small number of members ~300 and then plan to gradually add a few more people at a time to test our scalability. The initial set of members was selected out of the people that we see out and about getting together with others on a regular basis at a variety of local Portland meet-ups.

Next steps for the Shizzow Beta:

• A bunch of scalability testing
• Begin inviting more Portland peeps
• Expand focus to a couple more cities
• Get out of beta, and open it up to the anyone who wants to participate

We’re not evil monsters. If all of your friends are using Shizzow, and you were somehow missed on the invite list, you can enter the appeal process (2 forms of ID, stack of paperwork, first born, etc.) OK, kidding again; lighten up people. Seriously, just find me at one of the many local Portland events that I attend or email me, and tell me your story. I will get you an invite as soon I can. Your other option is to find a friend who has a few invites left and convince them that you are cool enough to join Shizzow.

On Wednesday, August 13th at 5pm at the Green Dragon, we are holding our first of what we hope to be many Shizzups.

If you like Shizzow, you can come buy us a drink to celebrate. If you don’t have an invite yet, show up before people buy us too many drinks, and we’ll set you up with an invite to the service.

You can RSVP on Upcoming to attend.

Hey, my name is Ryan, and I’d like to introduce you to Shizzow. Shizzow is a location-based social networking web service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction. Shizzow provides the technology for you to notify your friends of your location, with as little effort as possible, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.

Let me give a quick example for context… Let’s say that right after work I decide to enjoy happy hour at the restaurant Clarklewis. Once I arrive, I can use Shizzow to “shout out” from my current location. All of my Shizzow friends will receive a notification via email, SMS or IM that says, “Ryan is at Clarklewis”. I can also add a message to customize my status, “Ryan is at Clarklewis - ‘Drinking a refreshing mojito - come and join me!’ ” Now all of my friends know where to find me!

Each member of the Shizzow crew has a full-time job outside of Shizzow, and it’s taken a ton of sweat equity and sleep-deprived nights to bring Shizzow to fruition. But because we’ve believed in our vision and believed in the idea of bringing friends and like-minded people together, the sacrifices we’ve made have not seemed like work but instead like… something we simply had to do. And now, 10 months and tens of thousands of lines of code later, we’re ready to send out the first batch of invites for Shizzow’s private beta.

Along the way, we’ve developed a few tenets that I’d like to share with you:

1. Simplicity. With most features on our website we offer 2 settings: On or Off. We figure that you either want another person to know your exact location, or you don’t want that person to know your location at all. Rather than make you customize 7 different relationship settings for each of your friends, or choose from 6 different location specificity levels for sharing your location, we’re going to make it easy and straight-forward to interact with our service.

2. Community. The entire premise behind Shizzow is for you to get away from your computer screen and virtual relationships, and instead to clink pint glasses with your peeps at happy hour, or to stare dreamy-eyed over a steaming cappuccino into your sweetie’s eyes at the coffee shop. We won’t create gimmicky ways for you to remain on the Shizzow website; we want you to spend as little time interacting with Shizzow as possible, which will grant you more time with the people you care about.

3. Trust. Let’s be frank here: Shizzow is a location-based service that allows you to share your exact location with your friends or the rest of the world. With each line of code we write, we know we have to secure your location information and provide you with the tools to prevent creepy people from finding you. We don’t have a monolithic corporation behind our organization scheming to play Big Brother on you, and at any time, you can find me, look me in the eyes and talk to me about your privacy concerns. My ears are always open.

We’re über-jazzed that we finally get to share our vision with you, and hope you find that Shizzow enables you to live a better life, a life that’s full of meaningful, quality relationships.

Shizzow!

- Ryan and the Shizzow Crew