Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen an increase in the number of messages containing questions, feedback, and occasionally a pat on the back (thank you!!). This week, we’ve started actively using Get Satisfaction to take the conversation beyond email, and reach more of our users.

Get Satisfaction is a tool that makes it easy for us to have a public conversation with people who have questions about Whrrl. It also makes it easy to find topics that are currently active, to save you the trouble of documenting a problem we’re already working on fixing.

If you’ve contacted us before, you’ve probably received an email from Joni. She didn’t really want her picture on the blog, so I made this drawing of her this morning (before I had any coffee!). I’m particularly proud of the side-swept bangs, which are pretty accurate.

Joni will still be sending emails, but she will also be available on Get Satisfaction, along with help from Tyler. I was going to make a picture of Tyler… but I just can’t get his hair quite right.

Ways to Contact Customer Service

We can be reached at:

• feedback@whrrl.com
• help@whrrl.com
• customerservice@whrrl.com
• Through the feedback box on the Whrrl website, click the feedback link in the upper right corner.

Thanks to all of you who are telling us what you think, how you use Whrrl, and what you’d like to see in the future. Our goal is to learn what works, and what doesn’t, because it helps us make Whrrl a better experience for you. So keep the comments coming by whatever means you prefer; we look forward to talking with you!

The newest release of Whrrl leverages what people are saying and where they’re going, making it even easier to discover interesting places nearby.

Web Browser

When you view the detail page for a place you will see at a glance who has been there, what they thought, and who wants to go in the future.

Discover places to go to dinner before the theater, or maybe after work for happy hour. You can see the places people most frequently visited prior to, and following, the place you’re looking at in Whrrl.

What if the place you wanted to go happens to be closed? Whrrl will suggest other similar places nearby.

Recommendations in the iPhone App

In the List view, you will see places with a star if they are recommended for you, as well as a brief explanation of why they were chosen.

Hi! I’ve been following the emails and comments you’ve been sending to us about Whrrl, so I figured I’d jump in and answer some of the most frequently asked questions we have been receiving recently. For a more in depth look at frequently asked questions about Whrrl, check out this interview from Mashable’s SummerMash Seattle last weekend:

30 Seconds… GO!!

Whrrl leverages your social network and mobile location awareness to enable personalized discovery for the real world. Whrrl shows you not just where your friends are right now and what they’re doing, but also where they have been. By highlighting the places, events, and people most interesting to you, you can have experiences you might otherwise have missed out on. Whrrl is a tool that goes beyond social networking and friend tracking, by harnessing the experiences and opinions of the people you know best, and applying a powerful recommendations algorithm.

What Can I Discover With Whrrl?

Whrrl provides personalized answers to questions like “where should we go for coffee after the movie?” or “what upcoming shows are in my neighborhood with bands that my friends like, too?”. Discoveries can happen based on where your friends are, and what they’re doing right now (“Hey, Mike is at a place called Collins Pub – let me check it out”). Discovery can also be a result of interests friends have expressed for the future (“Casey and Becca both want to go to that new restaurant called Juno, maybe we can plan a girls night out”).

Does Whrrl Update My Location Automatically?

No, currently Whrrl will only update and share your location upon request. In order to show you a local map, the iPhone application will attempt to locate you when you launch Whrrl. The 3G iPhone uses GPS, and the version 1 iPhone uses cell tower and wifi triangulation.

Location updates are only broadcast to people in your People Who Can See My Location list, which you control at all times. When you indicate “I’m Here” at a specific place, using one of the incarnations of Whrrl (website, SMS, J2ME application, iPhone application), Whrrl will notify the people on this list of your location, and you will appear on their map in Whrrl. Currently, your shared location is only updated when you press “I’m Here”, but we’re working hard to make it even easier to share your location with the people you choose.

Is Whrrl Exclusive to the iPhone?

Nope, Whrrl is available in the Apple app store for the iPhone, and also in these other forms:

• via your web browser at http://www.whrrl.com
• via SMS, our short code is 94775 (WHRRL)
• as a J2ME application on the following phones (more coming soon!):
  • BlackBerry 8830
  • BlackBerry Curve
  • BlackBerry Pearl
  • Motorola V3m
  • Motorola V3xx
  • Motorola V9
  • Motorola V9m
  • Nokia 6085
  • Nokia N95
  • Samsung M610
  • Samsung SPH-A920
  • Samsung SPH-M510
  • Samsung SPH-M520

Have More Questions?

Email us at feedback@whrrl.com, we read and respond to every email we get.

Traveling to our event at BluWater Bistro I used Whrrl on my iPhone to find my way. At each intersection I tapped ‘Go’, next to Move Map to Current Location, and watched in awe as my map centered on where I was. I even called Emily, who was back at the office, and told her, “It works!” GPS has arrived, and life will never be the same (although I bet I’ll still manage to get lost somehow).

Thanks to everyone who came and contributed to a fantastic turnout of interesting people, as we hosted an invite-only event for technologists in the Seattle area. Pelago provided food, booze, and gave attendees the chance to have one-on-one conversations with the senior team and numerous employees. Guests heard firsthand what it’s like to build Whrrl for the web and mobile devices, including the iPhone.

Jeff was losing his voice, but managed to rally and give a talk about the founding and vision of Pelago. There was also a presentation on tough problems the engineering team is working hard to solve, and a demo of the Whrrl website and mobile application. Absent from all this was a demo of our new iPhone app, but I handed over my phone to folks so they could check it out.

The highlight of my night was when the Apple employee who sold me my beloved 3G iPhone last Friday at the Bellevue Apple Store showed up at the event. When I got my new phone (after 7 ½ hours of standing in line) the first thing I did was download the Whrrl iPhone app onto it, and proceeded to show him how it works. He looked us up online, and came to say hi. So cool!

Here are some pictures I took of the mobile application demo on my iPhone (this isn’t the iPhone app):

Wow. Yeah, Wow. This is my 3rd Internet startup and the second early stage one but nothing beats a big hit product launch. Hindsight being 20/20 I wish we had actually hooked up the bell to the new user account creation event that we joked about, it would have saved everyone time hitting refresh on the internal stats page.

We’ve had a team working on our iPhone app since the SDK came out (while at the same time re-vamping the web and Whrrl Mobile too, and adding new metro areas with deep meta-data) and put a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it along the way. Figuring out what from the full set of capabilities we have built into Whrrl from our web site and J2ME mobile application to implement as well as what to take advantage of from the nifty platform Apple provided. Doing User Experience for touch screens takes new thinking and keeping up with a changing SDK is always, err, an adventure

Beyond nearly the whole company watching the internal stats for downloads and sign-ups to the Whrrl community, we’ve been surfing all of the places we can find feedback – iTunes, Twitter, blogs, and of course, feedback@whrrl.com. We’re super excited to have folks trying out the application and caring enough to give out feedback. After all, we built the product for our customers to use, that’s what drives us. If you’ve ever built software before you understand the “first drink after exiting the dessert” feeling of seeing feedback from customers on something you’ve worked hard to make.

In the short 3 days people have been playing with Whrrl on the iPhone some trends are emerging and we’re back in the saddle (if you know me you’ll recognize the liberal use of metaphors here <g>) making changes on the server and iPhone client side to address common complaints and improve usability on pieces that are confusing.

Seems the top complaint so far is that our map doesn’t zoom. We know. It was a hard decision but we made some implementation choices early on that ended us up on a “you cannot get there from here” spot on performance of the map when zooming so we disabled it for the first release. Sometimes you get these things right (or get away with them) and sometimes you don’t, that’s part of the game, right?

We added ‘jump to location’ as an alternative way to jump around the whrrld while we work on a new approach that will give us a snappy and engaging map as the center piece for the application. Stay tuned, we’ll have the new maps implementation out as soon as we get it done. In the meantime, you can use the location icon in the upper left corner to either use the built-in location-finder or to type in the name of a city, town, zip code, neighborhood or even a street corner or address and jump there immediately.

Another common confusion is regarding our filters feature. You access filters by the button in the upper right corner. The filters allow you to change the lens through which you see the Whrrld and the filters let you remove the places from the map or list that you are not interested in looking at. The filters screen also lets you search for a specific place like ‘Starbucks’ or ‘AMC’. We recognize that it hasn’t been discoverable or intuitive so we’re working on new UI to make them both easier to use and easier to discover this powerful feature – who else lets you ask for all of the coffee shops that are open now with free Wi-Fi?

Keep the feedback coming, we love to hear from our customers and keep Whrrling!

Jeff Ayars, VP Engineering