twitter

We have Twitter integration to post your Shizzow shouts to Twitter, but the big change now is that you can easily import the people you are following on Twitter into Shizzow. Here are a few more details about how it works.

How to use the Twitter friend import:

• Go to your preferences page
• Click the Twitter link in the sidebar
• Activate the service by allowing Shizzow to access your Twitter information
• Click the Import your Twitter friends link
• For friends who are already on Shizzow, you can choose which ones you want to listen to.
• For friends who aren’t on Shizzow, you can invite them, which sends them a Twitter direct message with a request from you to join Shizzow.

What we do or do not do with your Twitter account:

• You never need to give us your Twitter password, we use oAuth to give you control over whether we can access your account.
• Shizzow will not automatically tweet from your account.
• Shizzow will not import all of your Twitter friends; you will need to manually select individual Twitter friends.
• For your Twitter friends who do not already have Shizzow accounts, Shizzow will allow you to send a direct message through Twitter to individually selected friends that you would like to invite to join Shizzow.
• After the friend import process, your account will be setup to automatically tweet your shouts through Twitter, but you can disable this at anytime by visiting the Twitter Preferences page. If you never want us to post your shouts from Twitter, simply disable your Twitter access after importing your Twitter friends.

We’re hoping this makes it easier for you to find your friends and use Shizzow. We would love to hear more about your experiences using the Twitter import on Get Satisfaction.

We also made a few other cool improvements in this latest release:

• Added favorites as a drop down menu on our mobile version (m.shizzow.com) without an extra refresh, and we added the search box to the bottom of the mobile page to make it even easier to shout from your web enabled phone.
• We made some other improvements to the signup process for new users to make it easier to get started on Shizzow.

As always, please let us know what improvements you would like to see in Shizzow. Most of our new features and bug reports come from you, so keep posting them to Get Satisfaction!

Shizzow was lucky enough to sneak into the private beta for Twitter oAuth, and we’ve held back on releasing Twitter oAuth integration for all Shizzow users until Twitter gave the green light. Yesterday, Twitter announced that it has changed its oAuth status from closed beta to public beta. Today, we’re offering Twitter oAuth access for any public Shizzow user. Yay!

To active oAuth access, login and visit the External Preferences page. Only shouts with messages will be transmitted to Twitter, and your tweets will resemble this format, “ZOMG! I love this cappuccino!! - at Stumptown Coffee Roasters http://shz.me/a1b2″

We are still ironing out a few kinks with oAuth activation, which currently only works in the Firefox browser. Once activated, you may use Shizzow in any browser. If you run into any problems, please let us know.

Update 1: Twitter fixed a bug on its end so that activation will now work in Internet Explorer.

Update 2: We fixed the bug that prevented Twitter oAuth activation via Safari.  Activation should now work fine in any browser.

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 Monday, we will be making an announcement about the private beta for Shizzow! A couple hundred lucky Portlanders will receive invites to try Shizzow. Keep an eye on this blog for more details next week.

You can also follow us on Twitter for additional updates from Shizzow.