Swaggle SMS

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.

Posted by Jordan at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

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.

Posted by Jordan at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

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:

Posted by Jordan at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

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.

Posted by Jordan at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

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!

Posted by Jordan at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Swaggle is back up. Sorry for the service interruption.

Posted by Jordan at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

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.

Posted by Jordan at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments