Over the last few months, Status Shuffle has seen a huge increase in mobile usage.  Just this past month, there have been over 3 million visits to Status Shuffle from mobile web browsers and 6 million visits through the native iPhone app.

Since we don’t yet have a native Android app, we wanted to improve some of the mobile Status Shuffle browsing experience.  (This will also benefit Status Shuffle users who prefer the free web based interface over the native application).  Today we’re introducing the first improvement: A redesigned favorites page optimized for touch based phones.

In this new favorites page, tap on a status to use it, or swipe to delete:

Alternatively, you can can tap and hold for an Android-style popup menu with all the options:

Common Questions:

Q. Why can I only see 250 favorites?
A. If we show too many favorites at one time, your phone will become unresponsive.  For those with more than 250 favorites, we are considering adding other ways to access them, but we’re not sure yet when that will be available.

Q. On my phone it doesn’t look this good / it works funny
A. A lot of the older phone systems (e.g. Android 2.x, iOS 3.x) had a lot of bugs in their browsers that can affect the way Status Shuffle works.  Please upgrade to the latest software release for your phone to enjoy the best experience.  If your phone is a Blackberry, things may not work as expected, since we built Status Shuffle mainly for Android and iPhones.

Q. I’m on the iPhone, how do I get to Status Shuffle on my browser?  Every time I click on the Status Shuffle icon in the Facebook app, it takes me to the iTunes store.
A. For iPhone users we recommend the native iPhone app from the iTunes store since it provides a much better phone experience than the web version.  However, if you are unable to spend $0.99 for the app, you can still enjoy Status Shuffle on the web by either (a) bookmarking http://m.statusshuffle.com or (b) opening m.facebook.com in Safari then clicking on the Status Shuffle icon in the applications link.

Q. Will this work on my Blackberry?
A. Although we built Status Shuffle mainly for Android and iPhone, it should work well on a Blackberry Torch.  To access Status Shuffle on a Torch, go to http://m.statusshuffle.com.

Q. When will the rest of Status Shuffle be optimized for my touch phone?
A. We will slowly roll our even more improvements for mobile phone users, so stay tuned!

Justin Bieber Fever has been known to cause everything from fainting to laryngitis to severe diarrhea.  Here’s how our shufflers diagnose the epidemic.

Imagine trying to play by the rules when you don’t know what the rules are.  That’s the predicament we find ourselves in.

Facebook recently started banning applications – permanently – based on a set of unpublished benchmarks.  Some great applications were banned, and we want to make sure Status Shuffle doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Facebook indicated that applications are being banned based on negative feedback to the application’s feed posts and notifications.  The obvious activity performed by shufflers is posting of statuses: a half a million statuses are posted every day from Status Shuffle.  Most of those are “liked” by the posters’ friends, so no problem there.

The other outward activity allowed by Status Shuffle is sending of statuses to friends.  Over 20,000 people send statuses every day, with nearly 50% of the recipients opening those messages.  We have no way to know if Facebook thinks that 50% is too little and we have no way to know if they will ban Status Shuffle because of that.  So, as a precaution, we’ve disabled this feature until Facebook tells us exactly why they’re banning applications.

We truly apologize for the inconvenience this is causing you, and regret that this is beyond our control.

Before I sign off, I’d like to answer a few common questions regarding this issue:

Q. When do you expect the send functionality to be re-enabled?

A. Facebook have indicated that they’ll provide more insight into their policies in a few weeks, so it will be disabled for at least that long.  Once we have more information from Facebook we’ll update this post.

Q. I’m upset!  What can I do to help?

A. If you personally know anyone at Facebook, email them and let them know that a feature you like was disabled due to their vague policies.  Feel free to point them to this blog post.

On May 1st Osama bin Laden became fish food courtesy of an elite team of US Navy Seals.  Here’s what our shufflers thought of this decade-in-the-making event.

Thumbnail Photo Credit: AP/Getty Images

Today we released the latest version of Status Shuffle for Facebook and Status Shuffle Lite for Facebook on the iPhone!

The big new feature for this release is the ability to access your recently used topics from the Topics screen.  No longer will you have to scroll through the list of topics to find your favorite one, since the last 10 topics you’ve used are all available with just a touch.

You can see how this looks on my phone to the left, where Zombies, Skittles, and hockey make an appearance because that’s pretty much me in nutshell.  Thank you Status Shuffle for making my favorite things so abundantly clear.

We’ve also made adding Favorites quicker than ever, and improved the overall speed and reliability of the app.

For those of you using Status Shuffle Lite for Facebook, we’ve listened to your feedback and made two big changes:

• We’ve increased the number of shuffles available in the Lite version by almost 4x!
• We now let you keep using all the statuses you’ve downloaded after hitting the Lite version limit, so you can keep enjoying them forever.

If you’ve already got Status Shuffle the update is waiting for you now in the App Store, and if you haven’t, why not?  Go grab full version or the Lite version from the iTunes App Store.

In “why should you care” news, two people who have absolutely no impact on your life whatsoever got married last month.  Our shufflers chimed in, and here’s what they had to say.

In fact, this is just the first in what will be an ongoing series that examines interesting events, topics, and people through the lens of what people are posting on their Facebook profiles using Status Shuffle, the largest collection of Facebook statuses on the Internet.  We hope you enjoy them!