Saturday, January 30, 2010

Changes to Swaggle Policy

Swaggle has become more popular recently, putting a burden on our little service. We're typically seeing lag times of 30 minutes or more for messages to go through, which makes it not viable for the purpose it was originally intended: a way for friends to coordinate their activities on the go. If you have to wait 30 min. to find out that a friend is somewhere and wants you to join them, and then they have to wait 30 min. to get your answer, your evening may be ruined.

So we have two choices: add more capacity, which is somewhat expensive (considering, as has previously been noted, we're not making any money off this) or make the services less popular.

We're going to try a little of both. From now on, we're going to be enforcing the "no commercial purposes" rule on Swaggle groups. That is, if your group is using Swaggle to communicate about some topic related to selling something, we're going to have to de-activate it. That's the best way we have today to decrease the throughput of messages.

That said, if your commercially-minded group is really getting value out of Swaggle, we're going to give you a way to pay for it. For $30 / month, you'll be exempted from the policy.

If your group has other special needs you'd be willing to pay for, let us know, maybe we can work something out.

Our goal here isn't to make money, it's to keep this service running. If we get enough from charging the commercial users to expand our capacity, great! If we end up needing less capacity because the commercial users don't want to pay, great!

We apologize for having to make this change. I wish everything could be free for all for ever.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Limits

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

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.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Still alive and reporting

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.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Sorry, Canada

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.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Our First Romp

IMG_7163

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!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Messages Being Dropped: Resolved

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.