Swirl Connect

By this time, you must have heard about Google’s latest new product release, Google Latitude. It’s a service that you can use on your location-aware mobile phone to find your friends on a map and interact with them — whether you’re on your phone or on your PC.

Wait a second . . . that sounds awfully familiar!

Oh, of course . . . it’s a great concept that we turned into Swirl Connect two years ago! We began development of Swirl Connect in late 2005, released it to the market in 2007, and the launch was met with a lukewarm response unfortunately. But the industry is all aflutter with the Google latitude release — not all of it good, of course. They are being met with the same criticisms that we were met with: primarily privacy and safety concerns. I would guess they’ve done a bit better job at implementation there.

We learned many valuable lessons in deploying Swirl Connect, and one of the big ones is that innovation, hard work, and time to market can be trumped by dollars and market reach. It’s an obvious conclusion, but one that is frequently ignored by aspiring ISV’s who think that a good idea and a little luck can create the next big thing. 

I still believe that to be true, but I think next time we’ll need to be a bit luckier!

Thanks to everyone who has used Swirl Connect in the past. While the software is not going away, it is going away in its present form. While development on this software is low priority for us, we are attempting to migrate this to open source, so if you’re interested in joining an open source mobile project, give us a holler.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Latitude, LBS, social networking, Swirl Connect

Yep, so things look a little differently around here, eh?

We’re in the process of moving servers as a cost cutting effort. While we’re doing that, we’ve had to shut down some vital services, e.g. our messaging server. There is no ETA on when or if we’ll turn that option back on. Money is too tight, and as a tiny software vendor, we’ve run out of it.

The blog has also been ported to WordPress, but we haven’t yet done anything other than add our favorite plugin array. Updating the blog is on our shortlist.

In the meantime, we’re still exploring how best to go about open sourcing our code base, so feel free to drop us a note if you’re so inclined.

You might have already noticed that we’ve been making some changes here and there. What you don’t know is that we’re making significant changes under the hood, so buckle up, it might be a bumpy ride.

We’re going to be pushing these changes out as they’re tested, so expect to see some intermittent errors or oddities over the coming weeks. But stay tuned, we have some good things in store.

NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke University, we have a little promotional tour planned for your campuses!

Keep your eyes and ears open during the coming 3 to 4 weeks, and you should notice signs of Swirl popping up here and there on and near your campuses.

Everything will culminate in mid-April, and you’ll have the chance to try Swirl out and collect some schwag. And there’s a little cross-campus competition aspect involved here, too, where you’ll get the chance to win a new phone, an iPod, collect some cash, or earn other free gifts.

More information to come soon.

I’m a little late in posting this, but we were featured on Killer Startups last week. They review up and coming Web 2.0 and mobile companies. We were sitting at the top of the charts for the week, but the clock is reset when a new week starts.

You can check out their profile of us, and give us a vote while you’re there! You can find us in the Top 10 | This Year | Mobile category — we’re sitting at #2.

Swirl Connect: a mobile friend finder, rich presence, location-based alerts

If you’ve been keeping an eye on our placemark coverage map, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been expanding our footprint to most metropolitan areas in the United States. We’re focusing primarily on meeting places, like bars, restaurants, coffee shops, cafes, book stores, arenas, and the like, but have avoided most retail establishments. It can be easy to get carried away!

While we’ve done the major metropolitan areas, coverage is still sparse in less populous areas. But you can help — and it’s easy! Just let us know what you’d like to see covered next, and we’ll do the rest. Rounding out our U.S. coverage is a priority, as well as initiating coverage in the UK.

Because all of our activities and connections occur somewhere, at some specific geographic point on the Earth, codifying those points represents another step forward in the evolution of our product. And we’re glads to be moving forward.

Your Swirl Connect friends list is very different from your buddy list on services like My Space or Facebook. Even though Swirl Connect includes some social networking features, it is not a social network. It is a service used to stay connected with your friends — your actual, real life friends — and connect with people and places near you. We use the word ‘friend’ quite literally.

With social networks like Facebook and My Space, friend collecting is common. You see a post you like, you add the poster as a friend. Someone shares the same interests, you add them as a friend. Someone looks cute, you add them as a friend. This is a not the wisest strategy for using Swirl, both for privacy/security and practical reasons.

You can, of course, use Swirl any way you see fit, but personally, I don’t want 100 acquaintances knowing where I am whenever I’m logged into Swirl. I also don’t want them peering at my pictures as I take them. I prefer to share these types of things with my actual friends. Before you add someone as a friend or accept a friend request from someone else, put yourself in a hypothetical situation (say, it’s 2:00 AM, you’re alone, and on your way home), and ask yourself if you want that person knowing where you are and what you are doing. If you cannot safely answer "hells yeah!" then you probably want to think twice about keeping that person on your friend list.

From a practical standpoint, the more friends you follow, the more alerts you’ll receive. Do you really want 100 alerts a night? And do you want to wait while we periodically query the statuses of 100 people? Do you want to wait while your poor, overworked mobile phone tries to display hundreds of activity items? Do you want to constantly zoom in and recenter so that you can see your nearby friends’ activity (by default, we zoom out so that you can see all of your friends)?

For best results keep your friend list short.

Please be safe and have fun.

We’ve added a placemark coverage map so that you can see if we’ve had a chance to add your area to our expanding list of places. We’re starting with larger metropolitan areas in the U.S., along with our hometowns, but we have plans to include many of the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. over the next few months.

For everyone outside the U.S., all I can say is that we’re working on it. If you’d like to get involved, please let us know! Of course, everyone can get in on the action by adding their favorite placemarks via their My Swirl control panel or Swirl Connect on their phone (it’s easier on a PC though).

If you’d like to see your city on here sooner rather than later, give us some feedback and we’ll see what we can do.

Just a reminder that the latest Swirl Connect release is now 0.8.6 Public Alpha. If you’re using a version prior to 0.8.0, you’re using our Private Alpha version. Version 0.8.x:

• Added support for new devices
• Simplified check-ins
• Improved the interface
• Added several discovery features
• Fixed some synchronization issues
• Fixed status updates on logout

Versions 0.7.x will continue to function normally, but upgrading to the latest version is recommended. When you upgrade, your phone will prompt you to replace your current installation and keep existing data. You might see a prompt similar to "Source has changed," "Trust this source," etc. Acknowledge these prompts to continue with the upgrade.

As always, feedback is welcomed. Either contact us directly, or post to the forums.

Thanks for your continued support.