Whrrl users on the iPhone, you’ve got an update waiting. Thanks to @chartier for being first to break the news on Twitter. The newest version of the Whrrl iPhone app has many improvements that are sure to make you say wow!

Maps Zoom

Pinch and double-tap to zoom in and out, and pan across the map with slide. Different zoom levels will surface different points of interest. Icons with stars in the middle are places that are recommended for you based on where people in your network have been, as well as what they thought of the places they visited.

Whrrl Radar

Shows you the locations of your friends on the map, even if they’re outside the window you’re currently viewing. Tap the person icon on the edge of the map, and you’ll see the name(s) of the people it represents. Tap a person’s name, and your map will move to their location.

Jump to a Location

Move the map to a specific location that you input in the text box. Use an address, city, or zip code to quickly center the map anywhere in the United States.

Move the map back to your current location by tapping the compass icon in the upper left corner. There is also be a compass in your Whrrl Radar (it’s in the first screenshot) that you can tap to jump back to your physical location on the map.

Talking About New Features with Justin from TalkingHeadTV.com

Thanks for all the feedback via Twitter as well as in various reviews, we’re listening to everything you have to say and can’t wait to bring you even more Whrrl goodness in future releases. If you want to reach us directly, you can email feedback@whrrl.com or send a message @Whrrl on Twitter.

We received some very helpful feedback earlier this week letting us know that people were having trouble searching for places in the Whrrl iPhone app. Sometimes places were missing from the map on the iPhone, even though they could be found using the Whrrl website. I promised I’d blog about it once it was fixed, so here it is!

Last night, we pushed out a server-side change that will improve search relevance. For this kind of change you won’t need to download any updates from the App Store, the change will just work, and has already taken effect.

A Little Whrrl Home Video

I’ve made a really quick video with my 10.1 mega pixel Casio camera (so please excuse the blurry start) to show you how this works. Thanks to Meg (my little sis) for the original music track.

So What Exactly Changed?

The search radius from where your map is centered has been extended, and is now two miles.

When searching for places that you think might be further than two miles from where your map is currently centered (across town, or maybe in another city), you’ll get the best results by using the Move Map To text box that drops down when you tap the compass icon in the upper left. From here, you can type in an intersection, city name, or zip code that is closer to the place you’re searching for. This is also useful for those times when your phone doesn’t find your location.

I’ll be at iPhoneDevCamp tomorrow and probably will be demoing Whrrl, if my phone battery doesn’t die in 3 hours as John Cook mentioned. If you’re going to be there too be sure to say hi!

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

Darren and I were so thrilled to be invited out to Apple’s HQ in Cupertino to see the live “iPhone Software Roadmap” presentation from Steve Jobs and two stars from his senior team, Phil Schiller (SVP, WW Product Marketing) and Scott Forstall (VP iPhone Software). As we’ve come to expect from Apple, the presentation was brilliant. You can watch it here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap/.

A number of very exciting things were announced by Apple about the iPhone (and many of the announcements also apply to the iPod Touch) in two primary areas:

1) iPhone enterprise support; and
2) The iPhone SDK

For Whrrl, the iPhone SDK is a big deal: we can now develop an amazing version of Whrrl for iPhone users, and you should know that we’re already hard at work on it. The capabilities of our iPhone application will go far beyond what is possible with a web application (that you get to via the browser on the iPhone), because the native application can access many more functions on the phone than a web application. Stay tuned for more details as the launch date gets closer!

You may have also seen Pelago mentioned in the Wall Street Journal coverage of the iPhone announcements (Friday, March 7th edition, page B1 — requires subscription). At the end of Steve Jobs’ presentation, John Doerr was invited to the stage, where he announced the creation of a new fund at Kleiner Perkins called the “iFund.” The fund is $100MM in size and is intended to help bootstrap the iPhone application ecosystem. Pelago, i.e. yours truly, is the first KP portfolio company in the fund.

If you’re interested in more detail, please read on for more of what was announced by Apple and what it means for Whrrl.

First, as a devoted Blackberry user (and I should point out that I was making great use of Whrrl both on my Blackberry and on the Web from the event), I can tell you that what the iPhone is about to get on the enterprise front makes me nervous for RIM — true push email, calendar and contacts fully synchronized with Microsoft Exchange Server via the ActiveSync protocol, which will be resident on the iPhone, so there are no intermediate components to worry about. Remote wipe, stronger wifi security, and so on. The ante has been upped, for sure.

More relevant to Whrrl, though, was the iPhone SDK piece. The roadmap is simply amazing: Apple recognizes the power of the platform they’ve created, and their very first SDK leverages it to an massive extent. Developers have access to the full range of APIs on the iPhone, and they very much parallel Mac APIs, including Cocoa, except that Cocoa was modified to handle touchscreen events instead of mouse and keyboard events — the revised Cocoa is called “Cocoa Touch.” The API set includes location (based on Skyhook’s wifi scheme as well as cell-tower-based location), the acclerometer, the address book, 2D and 3D graphics, animation, rich sound (including 3D sound), camera and photo library, all touchscreen events, and much more.

The development environment is equally amazing. Like the API set, it parallels the Mac development environment and is extended to offer iPhone-specific goodness. So developers get XCode (the IDE which also has the ability to debug on a real iPhone that is connected via cable to the Mac), Interface Builder (which allows you to visually design and wire up your UI), Instruments (which provide performance analysis, including real-time performance analysis of connected iPhone) and the iPhone simulator. Anyone who has ever done mobile development is or soon will be drooling over this environment.

As excellent as the API set and the developer tools is the application distribution ecosystem that Apple has created. Every iPhone will get a new version of its software that includes not only everything necessary to run third-party apps, but also the App Store, from which an iPhone user can download any Apple-sanctioned application to their phone. It even lets users know when an update is available for any application they’ve previously downloaded. Getting into the App Store does require sign-off from Apple, but from the sound of it, they only intend to block applications that are clearly troublesome, e.g. malware, massive bandwidth consumers, pornography, etc. Furthermore, Apple has set an up-front revenue split: 70% of the revenue goes to the developer and 30% to Apple. This is a developer-friendly arrangement for the mobile world, but Apple also allows for totally free applications, and they do not charge developers a penny for distributing a free product.

So there is a great deal to be excited about; as John Doerr put it, “This is bigger than the personal computer.” We couldn’t agree more. And most importantly from our point of view, the iPhone platform allows us to deliver an even more compelling product for you, our customer — that’s what really lights our fire.