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