We’re heard reports of some strange display errors on the site this morning. We just rebooted one of the servers and this seems to have fixed the problem from our own internal testing. We are double checking now with users who saw the problem.
Not to worry, everyone’s data is safe and secure. This was just a website viewing issue.
Let us know if you experience any further issues at support@splitwise.com, and we will report back here and on Twitter with any updates.
UPDATE: Problem seems to be fixed as of 11:41AM. Let us know if you experience any strange behaviors on the web.
UPDATE 2: And we’re back! Site performance may be a little slower than usual while we restore service – please bear with us, and let us know if you have any issues.
UPDATE: An Amazon AWS outage in North Virginia is affecting a number of sites, including Splitwise, Foursquare, GitHub, and others. We will update this post as the situation develops. Read more »
Our hosting provider is currently experiencing some infrastructure issues. They’re working on a resolution and we expect to be back online shortly.
Very sorry for the interruption – thanks for bearing with us!
Here at Splitwise we’re a small start up, which means that we don’t spend a ton of money on marketing and advertising. It’s something that we do ourselves through various outlets; one being answering questions on Yahoo! Answers when people ask about rental advice. It’s a good way to get our name out there, and get some visibility on our sweet rent calculator.
Well, it was a good way until last week. On Wednesday I woke up to my Yahoo mailbox looking like this:
When I logged into WordPress today, I saw that Splitwise is not the only consumer web application that publicly shares its loves of cats. Coincidence? Er… yeah, probably.
Splitwise is not just for roommates anymore. Adorable Kitten includes a new Android app, redesigned website, and PayPal integration. Split costs easily with any friend!
Today Splitwise is launching a major update to all of the “Splitwise” apps, on Android, iPhone and on our website. We’ve code-named this beta version “Adorable Kitten”.
While Splitwise has always been the best way to track roommate expenses, Adorable Kitten makes Splitwise the best way to split any bill or IOU. Now, you can create “friendships” and split a bill with any subset of friends – which is useful for group travel, bachelor or bachelorette parties, spotting a friend $20, and many more situations.
To make Adorable Kitten even more awesome, we’ve released a slick new Android app to keep up with our majorly redesigned website, which for the first time today integrates free P2P PayPal payments.
What started out as an innocuous piece of spam in my inbox has lead me to multiple sources of evidence that O2, a major UK telecom provider owned by publicly traded Telefonica (and sponsor of the England Rugby team and Arsenal football club) is benefiting from a pay for links scam. I’ve found 6 suspicious backlinks to O2 that exactly match the pattern of an illict “advertising” offer sent to the Splitwise blog.
The most likely explanation (if the JCPenny / SearchDex scandal is any guide) is that a search engine consultant or marketing company hired by O2 has created a scam on O2’s behalf to increase their search rankings.
If you’re looking for something to do tonight in the metro-Boston area, Splitwise is giving a demo of our new platform at local tech meet-up Providence Geeks. We’d love to see you there!
The Splitwise blog is back, and back in force. Here to the rescue – Nellie Hughes! Welcome!
We welcome Nellie at the Providence, RI Splitwise office.
Nellie is joining us as writer, project manager and all-around research person. She’s got a background in game design and creative project management, and we love her sense of humor. She just started Monday – woot!
Despite the last month of no-blogging, things have in fact been humming along. In the words of our good friends and fellow Betaspring alums Recovend:
Why U No Blog Anymore?
We’ve got great stuff brewing: a new Android app, and a sexy web re-launch. We’ve also been busy moving to Providence, and of course hiring Nellie. Apologizes if you’ve been waiting a long time for us to respond to your Dear Splitwise – we’re working on catching up on the backlog, as you’ll see later today.
Since we launched Splitwise, we have mostly focused on our core app: an expense-sharing platform for roommates and friends. What motivates us is the goal of improving relationships between friends. We make it easy for friends and family to organize shared bills, agree on what is fair, and be transparent with each other.
We realized one morning over coffee that the federal income tax system could use the Splitwise treatment. What do citizens think is a fair tax plan? How can we improve the quality of political debate and make taxes easier to talk about and vote on? We realized in our conversation that despite our passionate opinions on tax reform, we could not even remember what the tax rates actually are or where the brackets fall.
Enter the Splitwise Tax Fairness Project – a fun and educational way to visually modify and vote on tax proposals. Our in-house tax estimator, derived from IRS, Census, and NBER data, estimates the expected revenues from your tax plan. We are doing this as a non-partisan tax education project, and we plan to open-source our code so others can help us improve our tax model.
The idea of the Tax Fairness Project is to let Americans decide what is a prudent and fair tax code by letting anyone submit their own proposal. Visitors can play with the current tax code, see popular proposals and their impact on the budget, and vote on their favorite tax code through Facebook or Twitter. Splitwise will send the three most popular proposals to every member of Congress.
As President Obama and Governor Romney further outline their tax proposals, we will visualize them alongside top-voted user proposals.
Let us know what you think by commenting below, or email us at taxes@splitwise.com!
I was completely charmed the zany elegance of Austin’s Pink Palace, as described to me by Steven Kurutz in the New York Times. If you have a few minutes, go read that article – it made me smile.
Communal houses have a tendency to take on a wonderful life of their own, and it’s these crazy bonds and the joys of casual sharing that inspired us to start Splitwise in the first place. When Ryan joined Splitwise, he was keeping track of the group bills and IOUs for the “oothouse” at 16 Edgewood with a spreadsheet. Continue reading The Pink Palace, And Other Epic Shared Houses
The Splitwise Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.