Swaggle SMS

Limits

2009-03-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

Swaggle has been stumbling a bit under the load of its users recently (and no, we can't invest in increased infrastructure, see the previous post). To help relieve the pressure, we've imposed a few limits you should be aware of:

Groups are limited to 60 people
Chat-type groups are limited to 100 outgoing messages / 5 minutes. If you have 10 people in a group and each one sends one message, that's 10 x 10 = 100 messages.

However, as noted in the previous post, we are big believers in the gift economy. If your group is involved in the gift economy in some way (e.g., SantaCon / Burner related) and you need an exemption, please contact us and let us know the story.

How Swaggle Profits

2009-03-03T20:26:00.001-08:00

It's been over a year since I updated this blog. Truth is, Swaggle just putters along, serving the many mostly without a complaint.

You may have noticed that there doesn't seem to be a business model behind Swaggle. There are no ads anywhere, either on the web site or in the messages. There is no subscriptions being paid. So, how do we make any money?

We don't. And no, this isn't one of those "we lose money on every customer, but make it up in volume" or "we'll figure it out later" Internet bubble services. We're just not that interested in making money. (From Swaggle, that is. If you organize conferences or events, talk to us about Pathable).

At Swaggle, we're big believers in the gift economy. If everyone gives things away, you don't have to worry about keeping accounts balanced or making sure everything is fair. This isn't barter, where we agree to give something in return for something else. It's a gift. Things come around, we're not worried.

We created Swaggle because we wanted to use it and we wanted to provide it to our friends. If more people can benefit, mores the better.

If you get some benefit from it and feel you need to pay for it, we encourage you to go out of your way to do something nice for someone else, expecting nothing in return. If enough people do that, we'll consider Swaggle profitable, indeed.

Still alive and reporting

2008-12-27T20:55:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed from the blog, not a lot has been happening on Swaggle's backend (aside from hundreds of thousands of messages going through). We spend most of our time on our day job project (Pathable, a social network for conferences and events).

Still, we're making bug fixes and feature updates here and there as the whim strikes us, and struck us tonight, it did. For broadcast groups, when a non-owner / reporter sends a message to the group, it used to be that it was delivered only to the owner (that's the point of broadcast-only groups, only select people can send to it, it's not meant for chatting between members). Anyway, now the reporters will also get those messages from attendees, so they're effectively the same as owners. Useful if it's a reporter that someone is replying to.

Sorry, Canada

2008-09-08T22:28:00.001-07:00

Sorry, Canada, but I gotta cut you off. Look, it's nothing personal, I love you guys, but the way I run my service, it turns out it's expensive to serve you, and since I'm not making a penny off this, that's just the way it has to be.

Anyway, the valve is off. Sorry.

Our First Romp

2008-04-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, we announced Romp, our first Swaggle-sponsored group, dedicated to random fun. We're pleased to announce that, due to great planning by Sachi and Leo, the first Romp was a rousing success. The game was called, costume kickball at Cal Anderson Park, and the game was played.

Of course, we warmed up with some Spud and played a bit of Octopus Tag as well, but kickball was easily the highlight. As is the norm for costume kickball, additional rules were created as each run was scored ("yell the name of a fish upon kicking the ball", "dance to first base", etc.)

It's not too late to join Romp. The season is young, and so am I!

Messages Being Dropped: Resolved

2008-04-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

In turns out that the issue we discovered, where messages from certain carriers were being dropped before they ever reached us, was more widespread than we thought. We're obviously quite embarrassed that this escaped detection for as long as it did, but we're pleased to report that the issue has been resolved, and we've improved our quality control to detect this type of issue in the future.

T-Mobile Problems

2008-04-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

We've just discovered that messages being sent to Swaggle from T-Mobile customers are being dropped. We're investigating and hope to have this repaired quickly, but it may take several days. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Stability, Reliability, Performance

2008-03-26T23:54:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed some performance and reliability issues with Swaggle over the past several weeks. Our hosting service, Dreamhost, has been having problems that brought our service down for up to several hours per day. They're working on fixing it, but that was little solace to our users.

As of today, we've switched over to a more stable hosting service. Many thanks to Peter at Waggle Labs for making this happen quickly.

Descriptions

2008-03-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

It must be weird the first time you get a Swaggle message: "John invites you to join Foo, a text group". Not a lot of information to help you decide whether to join.

We added a small feature that we hope will help. When you create a new group, you can set a description for it. When you invite new people to join, we'll include the description in the invitation:

John invites you to HappyHour: "Coordinate our happy hour place". Reply .JOIN HappyHour to accept.

It's hard to convey much information in a little text message, but hopefully this will help. Let us know if you have other suggestions.

On another note, we've been having problems with our hosting service lately. If you've had trouble reaching the web site or sending messages, we apologize. Our host tells us it will be solved shortly.

Romp

2008-03-20T15:35:00.001-07:00

Swaggle is pleased to announce it's first Swaggle-sponsored Swaggle group: ROMP!

Live in Seattle? Want some spontaneous fun? Join Romp!

Romp is an unannounced summertime midnight game of Ghost in the Graveyard at Gasworks. Romp is a spontaneous Sunday afternoon game of kickball at Cal Anderson Park...in costumes! Romp is glow in the dark ultimate frisbee at Volunteer Park.

Romp is a Swaggle text messaging group. Sign up, and half a dozen times throughout the summer, you'll receive a text message to your mobile phone announcing a fun, playful event happening NOW somewhere in the city. Get out and play!

To sign up for Romp, send a text message with the words ".JOIN Romp" to Swaggle at (206) 694-9197, visit Swaggle at http://swaggle.mobi/ sign up and join the Romp group or just fill in your phone number below.

Your number won't be sold or anything nasty like that, you won't receive more than one or two messages per month, you can quit any time and it's free.

Enter your phone number below to join the romp Swaggle SMS group:

Reporters

2008-03-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

We've seen a nice increase in the number of "broadcast" groups, those that only the owner or designated "reporters" can send messages to. This is great, as we've considered this type of group full of potential: roving "party reporters" can scout out the good scene at night, for example. We used this type of group when we were traveling through Europe, as well, to send updates to friends back home without any extra chatter.

To assist the management of these groups, we've just added the ability to designate "reporters" from the Swaggle web UI. Previously, it was only possible through SMS.

Sorry, it's still not available through the iPhone interface.

I'm so pretty!

2008-03-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

Looks aren't everything, but they're something. Hope you enjoy the facelift the Swaggle web site just got. Big thanks to JLo over at ReadyDone for the fancy styling!

Swaggle Online

2008-03-03T16:25:00.001-08:00

Swaggle is back up. Sorry for the service interruption.

Outage

2008-03-03T10:39:00.001-08:00

Our SMS provider is experiencing difficulties at the moment, so Swaggle has been off-line since late last night. They are actively investigating and we hope to be back on-line shortly.

Sorry the for the inconvenience.

Numbers and Letters

2008-02-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

Some minor bug fixes were released to Swaggle tonight. The only functionality change you should see is that now names (both those of people and groups) may start with a number or a letter (previously names had to begin with a letter).

iSwaggle

2008-02-12T13:59:00.001-08:00

In keeping with the mobile times, we here at Swaggle are quite enamored of the iPhone, so we tailored a Swaggle interface just for that device. Just visit swaggle.mobi from your iPhone to try it out. You can create and manage your groups, send messages, change your name, whatever your heart desires.

Don't have an iPhone? As long as you have a Safari browser, you can still give it a whirl: http://i.swaggle.mobi/. (Well, you can try it on any browser, but no guarantee it will look right).

Group Management

2008-02-03T23:10:00.000-08:00

We introduced several new features tonight:

Group management: Group owners can now control their groups through the web interface (www.swaggle.mobi). When viewing a group, you'll now notice a "manage group" option that will let you change whether the group is public or private, broadcast or chat and even whether new members get announced.
Member management: Group owners can now boot members from a group either through the web interface (see previous bullet) or by sending ".BOOT groupname XXXX" where XXXX is the name of the person you'd like to remove. Once removed, a user must ask permission to rejoin a group even if it is otherwise public.

Thankfully, nobody has asked for that second feature, and hopefully you'll never need it.

Who you talking to?

2008-02-01T13:04:00.001-08:00

We've been noticing a common problem people have been having: someone is in two groups, they receive a message from one of the groups, reply to it and (I know, this is crazy), they expect that response to go to the group they just received the message from.

Well, that's not quite the way Swaggle worked. Because there is a single Swaggle phone number at the moment, the way we support multiple groups is to ask you to specify the group you're sending to (e.g., "skipals: Heading to the lodge" would go to the "skipals" group). To make life easier for the new user, we support the notion of a "default" group. That is, if you don't specify "skipals", we send to your "default" group, which is typically the first group you join.

So, if you receive a message from another (non-default) group and reply, we were sending that reply to your default group.

It wasn't working.

Now, Swaggle will send any message without a group specified to the group you last received a message from (within 2 hours). That way, if you receive a message and hit reply, it goes to the right group.

Hopefully, this will clear up the errors we're seeing, although we know it might also introduce a new type of error (you expect the message to go to your default group and it doesn't). Well, Swaggle is an experimental service, and we're experimenting.

The Link is in the Mail

2008-01-30T22:53:00.000-08:00

To make it even easier yet to invite people to join your Swaggle groups, we've added another option under the "Embed Widget" option on a group page: send a link. Just copy and paste the custom link you'll see on your group's Swaggle page and e-mail it to a group of people you want to invite, and they'll be able to punch their phone number in to get started with your group and Swaggle.

It's much the same feature as the embeddable widget, except now you don't need a blog or a web site to embed the link in.

Swaggle Widget

2008-01-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

Swaggle is easy to use, we're pretty sure. Still, getting started can be tough. Arcane commands sent via SMS, it's enough to flummox the not-so-tech savvy. So we made a couple improvements to Swaggle this weekend that should help:

Swaggle Widget: If you want to host a Swaggle group, you can cut and paste a bit of code from Swaggle onto your own web page to encourage your friends to sign up. For example, this one will get you signed up to the Swaggle Beta group. Just click the "Embed Widget" link from any Swaggle group page on Swaggle.mobi to find the code for your group.

Sign-up from the Web: If you're new to Swaggle, we'll get you started right from the Swaggle.mobi home page. Just fill in your number and we'll start you on your way.

Of course, letting people type in any old phone number could open a vector for SMS spam, which we hate, so we took a number of steps to ensure that we never harass anyone or allow Swaggle to be a vector for someone else to harass someone. Once you opt out or quit Swaggle, we'll never send you another unsolicited message, even if someone submits your phone number through our web interface.

www.Swaggle.mobi

2008-01-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

The Swaggleplex is pleased to announce the introduction of Swaggle.mobi, the web site for the Swaggle SMS service. With it, you can create and manage groups, issue and accept invitations and even review and send messages. Just send .pwd XXXX (where XXXX is a password you'd like to use for the web site) to Swaggle (206 694-9197) to get started.

Of course, there's lots of features you won't see on the web site (like the ability to send person-to-person messages), but rest assured, more is on the way.

This blog will be moving over to there shortly. If you're subscribed through the feedburner URL in our sidebar (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SwaggleSms), you don't need to do anything, you'll continue to get your Swaggle updates.

Now, please go to http://swaggle.mobi/ and let us know what you think!

Swaggle on Ruby

2008-01-16T15:55:00.000-08:00

We are very proud to announce yet another feature that should be absolutely invisible to you. As of this afternoon, Swaggle is running on an entirely new codebase, re-written from scratch in Ruby on Rails.

Why, you may ask, would we do such a thing, when it introduces no new features? Well, we're looking to future, and the new code base should provide more flexibility to expand Swaggle.

How? You'll have to wait and see. :-)

Huge, huge thanks go out to Peter Brown, Ruby ninja, for providing tutoring and advice on port. It would have been impossible without him. Thanks, Peter!

If you see any unusual behavior that may have been caused by the change, please let me know.

Swaggle Trouble

2007-12-12T12:43:00.001-08:00

Swaggle had a day or so long outage but is back up. Gremlins got into the system above the point where our outage alerts are issued, so it took us a little time to notice the problem. Thanks to Peter for making it right.

Invitations Fixed

2007-12-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

My recent update to Swaggle, introducing some monitoring and reliablity features, has already paid off. It alerted me to a bug I introduced a couple months ago regarding invitations to private groups.

When you invite someone to a private group, it should "pre-authorize" that person to join, so that when they send in the ".join group" message, they are automatically added. Instead, Swaggle has been going back to the group's owner and asking for permission a second time.

This has been fixed. I apologize for the inconvenience, and encourage you to let me know if you see behaviors like this that don't make sense.

Monkeying with the Tubes

2007-12-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

I made a large update today that, if all goes well, you won't notice at all. I added some maintainability, monitoring and reliability features that will help me keep Swaggle healthy and will hopefully have no impact on what you see or do.

The only reason I mention it is that occasionally things don't go as planned, so, if you see anything behaving strangely, please let me know asap by dropping me an e-mail at jordan@hive-mind.com with "Swaggle" in the title. Thanks!