www.blastogo.com/sparkyscville

Our buddies in Sparky’s Flaw will be playing Friday’s After Five tonight at the Pavilion.  Sparky’s is set to play around 6:00.  

1)  Blastogo was getting confused if you put a question mark after a friend’s name in the WHERE command (i.e. “where is kelly?”).  That’s been fixed.  Use as much punctuation as  you want.

2) Previously, Blastogo would only send a max of one message per five minutes.  That has been increased to two messages for five minutes.  So if you follow a friend and then they update immediatly, you will get both the following confirmation and their newly updated location.

Let us know if you find anything else acting weird.

Want everyone to see how cool your group is?  You can now send pictures from your phone to your group site on blastogo.com

Next time your group has an event, make sure to take pics on your phone and send them to yourgroupname@blastogo.com and pictures will be automatically posted to your group page.

The Club has some great pics from last week.  Check them out and upload your own!

www.blastogo.com/theclub

Welcome back!  Everyone should be moved in at this point, we hope you had a memorable first weekend at school.

As we all know, the first UVA home game is Saturday at 3:30 against USC.  

Cville kicks off the celebration on Friday with “Paint the Town Orange”.  Wear orange to receive 10% off your favorite stores on the Downtown Mall!

The party continues at Flirt!  Come by Flirt this Saturday at 10 a.m. for some free Vitamin Water samples, then head on over to the JPA tailgate from 12:30-3:30 with the Flirtresses!

Keep track of where your friends are tailgating by updating Blastogo!

We know we will!

Its Move-In-Day!

New Feature: If you decide to head home early and your friends stay out there’s a chance that you will continue to get their “updates” after you’ve hit the sack.  Unless your ringtone is a soft lullaby, that could be annoying.

Just text the word “snooze” to Blastogo (32075).  This will stop all text messages until the next morning.  Snooze before turning out the lights and don’t worry about being disturbed.  Messages will automatically resume the next morning.  You will miss any messages while snoozing, so be sure to catch up on the website.

If you long ago entered the world of the mobile elite and walk around with an air of superiority knowing that you are, in fact, better than everyone else because you have a cooler phone… here is one more reason to gloat:  We’ve put together phone-specific Blastogo versions.  Just point your awesomely hi-tech mobile device at: blastogo.com and sign in (or create an account).

The mobile version provides an easy input form for updating your location and provides quick access to the current location and status of all your friends.  You can click on location names to see who is nearby that place or to view it on a map (if your phone has one).  Its way faster than using text messages to do everything (though those work fine too).

Just finished a slew of bug fixes and small feature additions for Blastogo. The most significant one:  Blastogo will no longer send you more than 1 message in a five minute time period (except group messages and “where is” answers).

We noticed people often “followed” each other is groups of 4 or more (i.e. at a party) and all the following messages and confirmations generated a lot of traffic.  Now Blastogo will hold all the messages in a queue and instead of getting 5 “you are now following so-and-so” messages you will now get one “You are now following Tom, Jane and Sally” message.  Neat.

Blastogo works with any phone that can send and receive text messages (so, yea, all of them).  Here are the most frequent phone-related questions we get:

I can’t send messages to 32075. Some phone plans block messages to “short code” numbers like 32075 by default.  This is used by parents to prevent their kids from using those crappy ringtone sites.  You can just call your phone company and tell them to “turn on messaging to short codes” for your phone.

It took a long time to receive the message. There is nothing that can be done.  The phone comany’s sucks.  Sometimes texts take a while to arrive.  If it happens a lot, call your phone company and complain. Be sure to test with other numbers first (and check your Blastogo command spellings).

Is Blastogo really free? Yes.  However, your phone plan’s text message rate still applies.  Blastogo doesn’t charge anything, but you may only get a certain amount of texts a month for free.  Check your plan, or get unlimited texting (what all the cool kids do).

Update Blastogo when you are on your way to lunch / dinner / whatever and Blastogo will text you back if a friend is near by.  Eating alone is lonely.

Speaking of eating a lone: Welcome First Years!

Coming to college is scary.  Especially the first week.  You have no friends and everyone you meet is a potential best-friend-for-life so you have to be nice to everyone.  At least use Blastogo to follow your hall/suite-mates so that you don’t have to, ahem, eat alone.