sms

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!

In our last post, we talked about the big update today. The good news is that almost everything seems to be working. The bad news is that we’re having some issues with SMS. Currently SMS commands and notifications are offline. We’ll post another update here when we get SMS back in working order.

In the meantime, you can enjoy Shizzow from the web interface (please be gentle). We’ll need to push some bug fixes later, so we may have intermittent short maintenance windows until we get the SMS issue resolved.

Update: 6:50pm: As we suspected, the SMS issue was with our SMS provider and not on the Shizzow side, but it was a crazy coincidence that it happened on the same day. A few minutes ago, the issue automagically corrected itself. The only side effect is that everything queued up at the provider just slammed through the system. You may have just received a wave of notifications, and you might have noticed a few breakfast / lunch shouts coming through now. We’re hoping that things have stabilized, but please let us know if you have any additional issues.

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 made a few enhancements and some bug fixes this week as proof that we really do read all of that stuff that you post for us on Get Satisfaction.

Sorting of Messages within Shouts

As Reid pointed out, we were sorting shouts from newest to oldest while messages (appearing within shouts) were sorted oldest to newest. While this might have provided extra brain stimulation for people trying to figure out which messages were the most recent, we agreed with Reid that this was probably not the most intuitive sorting method.

Aggressive Logout

We were being a tiny bit aggressive with our timeouts, which occasionally logged people out even if they had just been active a few seconds ago. We’ve done some work on the session information in the cookie to help prevent some of these logouts.

Working with Favorites

The favorites configuration page to add / update nicknames and delete favorites was buried under the preferences page and was not accessible from your favorites link on the sidebar. I was confused by this, and the developers were kind enough to change it after they got tired of me bugging them about it.

SMS? Not Quite

A few of you noticed that we briefly had support for SMS on Sunday morning. When we rolled it out, we quickly found some unintended side effects and usability issues that we didn’t notice when we tested on our staging server. We were very sad that we had to roll our changes back out of production. On the upside, most of the SMS functionality worked, so it won’t be much longer now. Our initial SMS implementation will make heavy use of favorites nicknames, so if you want to prepare, you can add places to your favorites and give them short nicknames. Bonus points for memorizing your nicknames.

We also fixed a few minor bugs and made a couple of additional enhancements. Keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction