Swirl Connect

We have officially released Swirl Connect (Yes, as opposed to our previous unofficial
releases)! What exactly IS Swirl Connect you might ask? Well, it’s a free location-based crossover application that helps you stay connected with your friends, experience what your friends experience as it happens, meet new people while on the go, and find places of interest near you.

Whether you’re sitting at a computer, or you’re on the go with a mobile device, you can still connect with anyone else who is using the Swirl software. Swirl Connect supports nearly 200 handsets, including support for Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, and Samsung phones. We will be working on supporting another 100-200 additional mobile devices in the coming months. 

Swirl Connect includes popular aspects from several leading products, including mobile social software applications, web 2.0 sites, mash-ups and common communication tools.  Swirl-enabled phones allow you to see your friends’ pictures, placemarks and placenotes.  Phones with GPS receivers update automatically, while other phones require a quick, manual check in.   

All Swirl users have access to a web-based control panel called "My Swirl."  My Swirl archives all users’ (as well as their friends’) activity.  People, places and photos can be discovered with My Swirl and located with Google Maps integration. 

Initially, the placemark database will contain a limited number of placemarks, since much of this content is user-generated.  What does this mean to you?  Get out there and start listing some hotspots!  Find places of interest— places you’d recommend to your friends as great places to check out/eat/visit/tour etc.  The more you use Swirl the better it will be.    

So check to see if your phone is supported, get a Swirl account, and "Connect" with what’s around you!

We quietly added a ‘Quick Signup’ option to our web site in a recent release, which enables you to register for a Swirl account with minimal fuss. I have mixed feelings on this quick signup option. I like simple and fast registrations. Sometimes I won’t even use a site if it asks for too much information. But in Swirl’s case, this information really is needed to personalize your experience. So now we’re giving you the choice, and the trade off is convenience vs. personalization.

We don’t ask for your address in Quick Signup, but instead try to geocode you based on your IP address. We have about a 70 percent success rate with this, but we can only narrow it down to a city. So three out of 10 of you we won’t be able to find, meaning we can’t show you what’s around you. The other seven will be shown things near your city or zip code center, rather than your actual coordinates. You can always geocode yourself, however, and I recommend that you do so before you login via your mobile device for the first time. Swirl is much more fun when we can determine where you are!

We don’t ask for your phone make and model during Quick Signup. This only means that you’ll have to browse our WAP site so that we can auto-detect your phone, rather than being able to choose from all of our other download options.

We don’t ask for your phone number during Quick Signup. This means that we can’t push real-time alerts to your mobile phone, we can’t push instant messages to you, and your friends can’t use Swirl’s Quick Talk feature to reach you. You can, however, send instant messages.

Those are the three biggest concessions you have to make when you choose Quick Signup. And now you see why I have mixed feelings on this. I want registration to be as simple as possible, but I also want you to get the most out of Swirl. And those two wants happen to be mutually exclusive.

Blog Search Engine

Bug Labs has created open source hardware modules that can be snapped together like Legos to create a mobile device. You start out with the well-equipped BUGbase, with built-in Wifi, USB, and ethernet. BUGbase has four connectors used for snapping on the open source hardware modules. Each module or combination of modules you snap on enables additional device capabilities. Current and upcoming modules include:

• Camera / videocamera
• GPS
• touch screen
• motion sensor / accelerometer
• qwerty keyboard
• speaker and jacks

Then comes the software, also open source and community-developed with Bug’s own SDK. It looks like there are a handful of applications out there currently, with most being of the test variety, but it doesn’t take long for these kinds of plug-ins to gather momentum.

Sure, these things look like bricks, but you can’t beat the gadget appeal. A brick with an open source version of Swirl Connect? Even better!

Check them out at http://www.buglabs.net/.

We’re in public alpha testing and that means that we’ll be making frequent service updates over the coming weeks. It also means that you might experience intermittent service interruptions while we work things out. Hopefully these will be mostly transparent to you, but if you get an occasional "Page Cannot be Displayed" error or see a display abnormality (that’s a heck of a euphemism), you know why.

Feedback is welcome; you can use the forum for support requests, feature requests, bug reports and comments.  You can also track the changes we’re making in the software release notes topic. Along with changes, we’ll post any upgrade recommendations we have based on the fixes included in each new build.

We are working as fast as we can to offer Swirl Connect on more and more handsets, but we need your help. It’s impossible for us to test and verify our builds on every device out there.

Before we can focus fully on adding new devices, we need to verify that our current devices are working properly. Our general strategy is to test on at least one device per manufacturer platform, e.g. one Sony-Ericsson Java Platform 6 phone, one Nokia Series 60 Second Edition phone, and so on. But just because a phone works on one network doesn’t mean it will function the same on another. We’ve gotten wildly different results from carrier to carrier in our own testing.

If you’ve used Swirl Connect on your phone, we’d love to hear how it did. Positive experiences are just as important as negative ones, because as we verify support on one device, we can move on to others. All feedback is welcome, but what we’re really concerned with in this effort is if it loaded and ran without error.

We have a discussion topic ("Feedback on Supported Devices") setup to receive your feedback. Please post there with your carrier, phone make, and phone model, and a short worked/didn’t work note. If something was amiss, feel free to let us know, or even file a bug report if you feel like going into detail.

Thanks for your support.

We’re almost there. Actually, we’re past there, but we’ve decided to launch the public alpha (as opposed to the earlier private alpha) with far more supported devices than originally planned.

We’re aiming for an initial support list of roughly 100 phones, with a planned support doubling within 45 days and remaining phones added as time permits. These later devices, especially low-end devices, Palms, and BlackBerries, can eat up a significant amount of time in testing and porting.

But more phones = more potential service users = greater need for server capacity. The box is being built as I write this.

Thanks to all of our private alpha testers! Your schwag is in the mail, and those t-shirts are limited edition runs. Maybe we’ll see a few on eBay in a year or two.

At long last, the Alpha testing effort for Swirl Connect, including the My Swirl online control panel, is underway. We’re keeping our testing group very small, so that we can provide adequate support for testers, because we’re not yet running in a production environment, and because we expect to perform usability testing with a subset of testers.

The only phones supported during alpha testing are Nokia Series 60 2nd Editions and Sony-Ericsson Java Platform 5 and above. Ideally, you’ll live near us, so we can peer over your shoulder as you perform some operations.

So what do you get (aside from our eternal gratitude) for your help? Probably some schwag, including a limited edition Swirl testing team t-shirt, some member account perks with the new service, and the opportunity to help shape our service. If you’d like to be involved in the testing effort, please drop me an e-mail.

In other news, Happy Holidays! Best wishes for a perfectly adequate 2007.

So, what have we been working on recently? Of primary concern to us has been as broad of device support as possible, whether that means offering multiple editions of the Swirl Connect software or  implementing functionality differently on different devices.

To aid in this effort, we’ve  begun to open much of the mobile functionality to a PC web browser. Not only does this make the software usable by more people, more often, but it also opens a new dynamic of real time interaction, regardless of access method. It also opens the door to our vision of the next software release (yes, that would be one major release after our as yet unseen first release!), which is wifi support.

Stay tuned for a private alpha release announcement soon, and if you’d like to be part of the testing effort, drop us a line. There’s a Swirl badge and possibly some schwag in it for you!

We’ve been working over the past month on our official targeted device list for Swirl Connect. I write "targeted" instead of "supported," as this is the list of
devices that we intend to support, and not necessarily the list of
devices that will be officially supported upon product launch. Swirl Connect, by the way, is the name of the software that installs on your mobile phone.

We still have a way to go on our support list, and it involves poring through specifications, manuals, reviewing emulators, and testing out working phones. It looks like our initial support list will contain almost 300 mobile devices, considerably higher than our initial estimate, due in most to a change in support strategy.

We’ve decided to release Swirl Connect in a tiered support plan. Tiered support, as in categories of devices with different features supported, rather than tiered support, as in different payment levels. Our only payment level is free. But I guess calling that a payment level is a bit of an oxymoron.

If you’re playing along at home, here are the basic phone requirements for using Swirl Connect:

• Basic Support: MIDP 2.0 phone with either CLDC 1.0 or CLDC 1.1. Support for the Wireless Messaging API and the Multimedia API. Also required is an Internet connection and some kind of persistent data storage, either on the phone, or installable as part of the software, but both of these are a given if your phone supports MIDP 2.0.
• Full Support: All of the above, plus support for the Bluetooth API.
• It’s Good to Be King/Queen Support: All of the above, plus support for either the Location API or the PDA API.

If your phone was purchased within the past year or so and has Java support, chances are high that some level of support will be available. If you’re wondering whether your phone specifically will be supported, or would like to request that your phone be added to our support list, drop us a line, and include your phone’s manufacturer and model. We’ll get back to you shortly with an affirmative or negative.