WOMPLife Friendship

We are proud and excited to announce a partnership with a pretty sweet new site called WOMPLife – a place where you can read up on the latest Electronic Dance Music (EDM) news, listen to music, catch up on artists, or find the next event you will be rocking out at.

WOMPLife will be one of the first in the door working with the us and the new Shizzlr Widget – allowing site visitors to start private groups right on its website and/or across apps focused on EDM news, artists, and especially events.  Users will be able to find a new artist on WOMPLife and use our widget to talk about their songs with friends, and then figure out when to see them live.

As of right now all you can see is our tiny ad on their site…along with all their awesome content that is. But within the next few weeks we will begin rolling out the widget, app involvement, and a few other tricks up our sleeve.

So for now go check out WOMPLife.com, the founder Brett Kernan has done a great job to drive a ton of new traffic to his pages within its first three months since Hello World.

And if you have any questions or want to find out more information about our widget you can check out Shizzlr.com/widget, or of course contact us at bizdev@Shizzlr.com .

Thanks and doShizzlr.

–          Nick

A Change Side by Side Shift of Gears

…yes that’s it…the perfect title…

HI ALL

It has been a while since we last spoke – hope everyone is enjoying the beginning of summer.

Over the past few posts/tweets/shares you may have been able to figure out we were taking a new twist on our private groups – basically creating a widget version of our platform.  This is being worked on in addition to maintaining and updating the apps and website (which is actually being reworked as I type) as they are now – so don’t fret nothing will change on that front other than hopefully they continuing to get better.

SHORT STORY

But what is this new stuff?  Well basically a few months back we started getting asked by event aggregators, venues, and brands with events how they would be able to get more involved on our platform – since our platform is relatively unique in the way that it treats events, brands and locations as objects to be shared into group chats so everyone can see them regardless of channel of communication they are on.  After the third different meeting in a week span, and hearing some overlapping things, the team sat down and turned our head sideways a bit – and actually thought we could help them much more than merely listing/featuring content on our website and apps.

Long story short (aka I’m skipping the value proposition story for now since it is our sell) we created the Shizzlr Widget – a tool to allow event, venue, and brand website page visitors to start a free private group chat (across text, Facebook, email, and apps), bringing that pages content to their close friends to talk about it and easily be able to get back to it.  Essentially similar to a Facebook Share or Tweet button, but rather than sharing to the large networks for everyone to see, comment on, and more than likely get lost; this chat only goes to your close group of friends and via the way you usually talk with them about doing things.

USE CASE

For example, imagine you are on RottenTomatoes looking up movie reviews and something shows up you want to see.  First reaction thought – who else would want to go?  Start a group with the Shizzlr widget, invite the four friends that won’t mock you for wanting to see Brave despite it looking awesome and being Pixar…and then group chat directly on the RottenTomatoes site (looks like gChat), or text, email, or on our apps about who wants to join in and when you want to go.  Everyone can click the initial message (look below) and get back to Brave’s RottenTomatoes page to see all the info along with show times (something that is always the worst thing to figure out with a group of friends).

The point is to keep the content that you want to talk about close to the private group chat with your friends.

BUSINESS VALUE

Conversions! – Of ticket sales, registrations, purchases, Degrees to Celsius.   An example feature (one of a few we have hidden up our sleeve…oh jeez no…I’m wearing a basketball jersey…I’m ruined!) for RottenTomatoes is to be able to see that there are 1,400 groups talking about Brave and send a message to each of those groups like “Buy now and get 15% off your group ticket purchase”…whoa that’s powerful.

END SCENE

Hopefully this gives you a sense of the new things we have been working on.  Definitely a different ball game not going after users 100%, but things have been going great over the past month and a half, so if that is any indication of how things will be going forward – we are happy.

To find out more info about the widget and custom mobile apps (yes I didn’t get into that so much) please check out Shizzlr.com/Widget or email us at BizDev@Shizzlr.com

 

Talk to you all soon.  Wear sunscreen.

–          Nick & the Shizzlr team.

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

www.shizzlr.com/memorialday

Fandango Movies and Times!

Hey!

So we are pretty pumped because for a while a bunch of users have mentioned how finding and picking movie times is always a huge hassle between a group of friends, and would be awesome to be able to share those type of things in their Shizzlr groups.

And wallah.

Remember all those times you wanted to see a movie and the hassle it was to pick a time, place, and flick everyone could make and wanted to see.

Well thanks to Fandango and our groups that shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Search through movies on the iPhone and Android apps, share them into groups, and all your friends can see the details, available showings, and times.

Pick a movie and group chat about going to see it with friends.

This is what it looks like to pick the movies filter.

Enjoy the movies.

Roll end credits.

The evolution of Group Communication

Technology is always enabling us to make processes in our real life more effecient, and it seems the case that one of the newer cutting edges is increasing the richness of our social communication. With the exponential adoption of smart mobile phones and app development over the past couple of years, social communication has evolved drastically from standard emails and text messaging to private group communication crossed over with small social networks.

The roots of group messaging began about two years ago when companies like Twilio made SMS costs cheaper both financially and thru decreased develoment time. With API’s available like Twilio’s, companies like GroupMe pioneered the group messaging space. Their apps and website allowed people to send text messages to each other as if they were an email with a reply-all feature.

Private group communication wasn’t just about text messages though. The combination of Facebook’s massive growth and privacy concerns, and mobile applications on the rise, gave cause to the development of private social networks based on your phone contacts (aka your real social network as some would call it). Companies like Path provided a day-to-day journal-like social network that allows you to share pictures, videos, and messages with your ‘real social network’.

Within the past year we’ve seen Kik, which is more of a pure group messaging app like GroupMe, release its own development libraries to allow other apps to share content into a Kik conversation. The theory being you could have one app to draw pictures and then share that into one of your group conversations on Kik, and your friends in that Kik convo could then interact with what you’ve shared.

Another company creating their own spin on evolving group communication, Kibits, has recently developed an app that focuses on sharing images, video, messages (almost what’s become standard), as well as notes, links, locations, and documents. Their apps are pretty sweet and sharing media within a group like this is very effective. It’ll be fun to watch where they go with this and if they extend the platform with a fully functional website.

Of course I saved the best for last 😉 Our goal with Shizzlr is to bridge the gap between group communication and local discovery to allow people to have a better social experience figuring out their social lives. We’re trying to increase the richness of social communication by not only seamlessly connecting friends across Shizzlr, Facebook, email, and SMS, but also to allow them to share social objects like events, places, and ideas with each other. People can discover public events going on around them and great places to check out, and then share them into group chats with their friends so they can hang out and have some fun things to do.

Who knows what’s to come, but in the mean time I’ll do Shizzlr!

iPhone App update 4.0.4 (that number doesn’t mean anything)

Hey all, 

A few days ago there was an update to the iPhone app  and so I just wanted to sum up some of the new things in it – because well the additions are simple and sweet.

Updated iPhone App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shizzlr/id325954838?mt=8

Oh and don’t forget the ol reliable Android App that was updated early last week: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shizzlr&hl=en

So what’s new in these latest apps?

1. Search Shizzlr users to add as friends

To make it even easier to find people we added in the ability to search existing Shizzlr users to add as friends, not just adding friends from you phone contact list (or if your on the website using Facebook,email, and phone).

2. Discover & Share Eventbrite Events

Eventbrite is a ridiculous event aggregation site that has a ton of great stuff – so to show you more stuff to potentially do with friends we added it into the event filters.

3. Ditto for Meetup Events

Because we all love at least a few Meetups…even if they are for work purposes.

Hope this helps, now go and enjoy this shiz.

Easter Egg Hunt Share

Happy start to an awesome Easter Weekend everyone!

Share into your group chats the great idea of an old school Easter egg hunt. For us more experienced folks use beers rather than eggs and be ready it gets feisty.

www.Shizzlr.com/Easter

Getting comfortable with the new Photoshop beta

Good opportunity to mess around with some icon and logo design.

The last one is my favorite.

– Keith Woodward

Happy Birthday Brian!

To the man that we all thank for our excellent Android app – happy birthday.

 

Walmart vs. CVS in Event Listings

Reaction to an article I read just a little bit ago: Here

What caused me to write this: The article was about LifeCrowd, a new web site that shows events for people to discover and go to (not necessarily knowing anyone).  As with every article I find dealing with something in our space I pass the link along to the rest of the team just so at a minimum they open it up, see the name, and move on.

KHB responded with the quote that stuck out to him; “In other words, the event listings on the site may not be as long and thorough as those featured by your hometown paper, weekly mag, or other events guide, but that’s by design. LifeCrowd is aiming for quality over quantity”.  As we are working, pulling our hair out, to finish an update to our events section, and thinking about a few other event aggregators that have come out recently – it got me thinking that the trend is you’re either the Walmart (Eventbrite, Meetup, Facebook, Eventful) or a CVS (LifeCrowd, SOSH, WillCall) of event aggregation – but I want both.

What I hope happens soon: I hope that soon there is enough of these niche CVS’s of event aggregation that well be able to provide both quality and quantity display for users on Shizzlr.  It will be awesome when you can share WillCall’s show deal right into a group of your friends on Shizzlr to talk about buying tickets, and the next day share a biking trip you learned about on Zozi, and chat about when your going or who has an extra bike.

What we have now: Right now we are certainly going all Walmart (as you can see in this snapshot of the next version of our website).  Grabbing from the largest event sources to provide the most content possible for users to discover and share into their group of friends on Shizzlr.

And the way we built it i’m really hoping that between adding search, some added filters on both the frontend and backend, and more event creator partners well be able to offer both quality and quantity for users to discover things to do and share with friends.

Semi-tangent thoughts: Anyways..one more thing… on a quick sidenote the first comment in the article I mentioned above, was “This should be an app for your smartphone so that events will be listed based upon their location”.  I need to get back to them b/c we are on it as you can see here:

Jeez and an one more thing – we realized that people would want to see events  first before sharing them with friends to chat about it, so very soon we’ll be updating our web site so you can browse events and places before signing up/logging in.  Here’s a snapshot of a mock i did a bit ago below because KW would shoot me if i showed you what he was doing now.

Have a good weekend everyone