Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Who are you?
Fixed a couple of problems I found by perusing the logs:
- I noticed that first time users were having trouble with the leading period before join (e.g., sending "join group" instead of ".join group"). I made the system a bit more forgiving: if you're not already in a group and the first word you send in is join, I'll spot you the period.
- It used to be that we would set your name to the last four digits of your phone number, then let you change it to something personal at your leisure. With the change I made last night, however, a new user is announced to the group immediately upon joining...before s/he has a chance to set his or her name. It looks weird, and nobody knows who's joining. So I added a delay: first you are asked to set your name, then you're added to the group and announced.
Also fixed a bug where additions to private groups weren't being announced.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Welcome Messages
When a new user joins a group, a note will go out to everyone in the group letting them know. This serves a couple purposes: it ensures you won't be caught off guard by someone joining the group without you knowing about it, and it provides a sense of activity around a group as people start to come in but a dynamic conversation hasn't yet begun.
Also made Swaggle a bit more forgiving in terms of syntax by swalling extra spaces: ". join group" will work as if you had sent ".join group" now, for example.
Also made Swaggle a bit more forgiving in terms of syntax by swalling extra spaces: ". join group" will work as if you had sent ".join group" now, for example.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Multiple Invite
To make invitations easier, we've added the ability to invite multiple people to a group with a single message. At the same time, we changed the syntax slightly for invitations, so that the group name comes first. For example, the following command will send invitations to three people to the group "foo", two phone numbers and one to a person with the name "Jojo" that has already registered with Swaggle:
- .invite foo 2065551234 2065556789 Jojo
Friday, July 20, 2007
New Number
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Secret Squirrel
Who's Playing?
Many improvements to Swaggle tonight:
- From a conceptual point of view, I've changed the idea of "tags" to "groups". Now, instead of "tagging" yourself "ultimate", you would join the "group" ultimate. There's no practical difference (all it meant was some string changes), but it should be easier to understand and explain.
- I added the ".WHO
" command to find out who has joined a group. For example, if you send ".WHO ultimate", Swaggle will reply "Jojo, John, Amy are in ultimate" - I changed the permission model so that any member of a group can issue an invitation to a new member. This should make the group growth process more organic. In the future, I plan to add a group type where only the owner can add and a group type where only the owner can broadcast.
Please feel free to leave comments on the post or e-mail me at swaggle (at) hive-mind.com if you have comments on these changes, feature requests, etc.
I also made some progress on a Web UI tonight, but need to spend a bit more time on the security model before releasing it.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Default Tags
Always typing in the name of the tag you want to send a message to can be something of a bother, especially if you're usually only sending messages to one tag. To make things a bit easier, we added the concept of a "default tag". If you send a message without the "
For example, if my default tag was ultimate, I could just send "Pick-up game at Cal Anderson Park NOW!" to Swaggle, and it would be sent to everyone with the "ultimate" tag.
You can set your default tag and find out what default tag is by sending:
- .DEFAULT
: Sets your tag - .DEFAULT: Will return your default tag
New users will automatically have their default tag set to whatever tag they add first.