As Silicon Florist pointed out earlier this week, a new service called Shizzow recently launched as a private beta here in Portland, Oregon. This location based service is intended to connect friends by broadcasting your current location. According to their site:
Shizzow is a location-based social web service that we built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction. Shizzow provides the technology for you to notify your friends of your location, with as little effort as possible, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.
As I think about Shizzow and the site’s use cases, I can’t help but wonder how this service is any different than existing location based services (LBS). More specifically, how is Shizzow any different from Fire Eagle by Yahoo! ? Shizzow recently posted about this topic on their site, but the post failed to address how they are different and/or better than existing LBS offerings.
Fire Eagle is a service that tracks your current location and gives the user super-granular control over the location data. The service strives to ensure the user that they are in control of this private data that could otherwise be exploited. Fire Eagle is more useful currently because of their API inclusion that more than 50 location services such as BrightKite and Plazes use.
On the surface, Shizzow appears to be just another place to put my data that is another silo of information on the net. They have no API and no integration with other sites. At least with Fire Eagle, I can advertise my location to many different services and many different devices.
Shizzow has one thing going for it: it knows business names, not just addresses. This is useful because I may want to broadcast that I’m at Starbucks on 4th street, but most LBS services will say, “Jason is as 214 4th Avenue”. Having the business name makes it easier for my friends to find me.
I am not trying to be critical and I am very excited about Portland based startups. However, I want to offer my feedback from a subjective viewpoint. I look forward to the comments and discussion to follow.
Please educate me. 🙂
So, my take. Shizzow is a shadow of other LBS like Brightkite and Plazes in terms features and functionality (no SMS, no mobile/iphone, no pictures, etc). I spent a couple months using Brightkite, but it just didn’t see much pick-up locally. I think it’s been called the “location problem” for services like these that are city agnostic, they have a lot of users, but in a particular city, there aren’t enough to make it go viral, and so it dies off.
So, if it’s true that Shizzow is just focused on the Portland region, then perhaps it can get that viral take-up and build a strong service. I wish ’em luck.
I think you raise some interesting points. And some topics, no doubt, with which the Shizzow team is currently wrestling, as well.
My take is this: all things being equal, I’d rather “shop locally.” Meaning? If it’s pretty similar to Brighkite, but made in Oregon? I’m going to pick Shizzow over Brightkite.
Just like I tend to use Strands as a lifestreaming service, more than the other non-Oregon services.
Why the hyper-regionalism? Access to the team. Support for the community. And the hope that their success reflects well upon the region as a whole.
It appears that Shizzow’s model is not extensible beyond individual cities (similar to Dogeball from what I can gather). Location platforms like Fire Eagle and Brightkite are latitude/longitude based and have the ability to operate worldwide, inside and outside of cities, not to mention their APIs. The limiting factor of operating within regions contributed to the demise of Dogeball. Maybe I’m missing something but whats new that Shizzow brings to the table?
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You said: “Shizzow has one thing going for it: it knows business names, not just addresses.”
I keep hearing this and it implies that other services (like BrightKite) don’t have this feature.
I use Brightkite and almost always post by searching for the name of the business I am at and the city I am in. Works for me about 95% of the time.
In fact, I highly suspect that BrightKite and Shizzow are accessing the SAME data. Take a look and compare….you’ll see what I am saying (same format, same order, same results, etc).
Though I hope Shizzow succeeds, I am getting sick of all the ‘homers’ that are hailing this service like it is so unique and special.
People should call it what it is…a cool product form some cool local people. They should be honest like Rick was above: he’ll use it cause it’s local, not cause it offers anything unique. That is totally fine and fair.
You have a great write up, I appreciate your unbiased view and the points you brought up. Probably the most honest post about Shizzow that I have seen.