Shizzow was released today in Private Beta to various members of the Portland Tech Community - or at least a lot of Portland Twitter folk.

Shizzow is Portland-based social network Geolocation service with exceptional data granularity. That means that it is possible to define your own location (my house is Caseorganic Laboratories and Bram’s is Link En Fuego Headquarters).

Local networks have been in need of this service for a long time. Services like BriteKite don’t offer the sheer amount of nuanced locations that a local network like Shizzow does.

I received my invite from Dawn Foster at 10:16 Am and only a few hours later I had already had 10 friends “listening to me”. Listening is the equivalent of a “follow” on Twitter.

Geolocal Shouts

Shizzow also has “shouts” instead of Tweets, which serve to inform other listeners of a user’s location.
Before long, I knew that @reidab and @donpdonp were at Urban Grind Coffee NW, and I didn’t have to sort through my Twitter feed to gain the knowledge.

Cleaning up the Twitter Feeds

Shizzow takes the communication capabilities of Twitter and applies them to location, giving locations a feed. For instance, I can see the history of a location by clicking on it. Through this, I was able to discover that a fellow Twitter contact was at Backspace seven hours before me.

Adding/Finding Locations

Shizzow has a ton of locations already listed, but one can also add locations that don’t. When I typed in the location of the Portland Small Business Accelerator, it recognized it as an ‘office’, and I was able to add it to the list of locations I’m capable of regularly shouting from.

User Interface

I found the UI to be smooth, and the ability to add connections very simple. I also used it to find Dawn Foster and friends at a Green Dragon Shizzow meetup. She and other founders were working on fixing minor bugs already. What service! Not bad for a first day of beta!

Resources

If you’d like to know more about Shizzow, mosey over to Shizzow.com, or read the awesome Silicon Florist post about Shizzow.

I want to thank everyone who worked on Shizzow for doing such an excellent job. We’ve all been reading  and waiting for a great futuristic technology like this to finally come about. While we were thinking about it, the Shizzow group went out and did it. Major Kudos to them.

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