Roadmap for upcoming upgrades

I have received some great suggestions from UserVoice, and plan on implementing them. My reason for not doing these already is that they require API interaction that I am not able to test from Baghdad, so I have to waut until I am back in the states in order to get this working.

Texting in debts - I am going to allow users (after phone number verification) to text (SMS) in their debts by simply sending in things such as 'stan owes me $5 for the strip club' or 'I owe Sara $50' from their mobile phones. I have done a little research and I am planning on using ClickaTell as their API/prices seem to be the best. I will be documenting the whole thing on my dev blog if you are interested in how it is done. 

OpenID - Using RPXNow, I plan on integrating OpenID along with Facebook, Google, etc. for my logins. This is in addition my own login system. This will be great for users who are very security paranoid/careful, as I prefer to use symmetric encryption which some people are not happy with.

If you have any suggestions or ideas about how to implement such things, I would be more than happy to hear them.

If you want them to, every email you send will include a link to pay you with Paypal

Now on the My Stuff page, if you check the 'integrate' box under 'Paypal Integration' and fill in the blank with your Paypal address, email nudges will be sent with a link that will direct the debtor to Paypal with your info already in there. The link will have the recipient (you), the amount, and a note already populated; they just have to click and give you their money! Also, remember your Paypal account must be able to accept payments in order for this to work.

Now I know that everyone is not a fan of Paypal, but it is the most ubiquitous online pay method out there, and it is ridiculously easy to use, so I used it... quit your whining.

Thanks RJ for this idea, I think it's great.

In an effort to speed up the site before I try to draw in more users

Using Google App Engine and this amazingly simple tutorial on how to use it as a CDN, I am able to use Google's bandwidth and speed to save my server from getting murdered if this site ever picks up a lot of traffic.  Also, I found out that because of this, if your firewall blocks Google App Engine (which mine does) the site will not work as you can't get any scripts or style; I am going work on getting around this (or at least an explanation why it isn't working), but no promises.

Did someone pay part of what they owe you?  Now you can track that too

Often times, people do not pay up all at once. Now, by using partial payments, you can track those. Simply click on the paid up icon [] and click 'partial payment' and enter the amount. This is only available on money items. Thanks for the suggestion Brian.

You can send some funny and/or slightly offesive reminders to the people that owe you to pay up

Say someone is taking their time on paying you back, and you need your money now. Now there is a simple way to send the a friendly (or not so friendly) reminder. Simply enter their email into the 'person' column, and a little email icon [] wil magically appear; click on it to send them a message. No you don't get to choose, it is randomly chosen, which is half the fun anyways right?

Right now you have to manually enter an email. I am thinking of making this a sharing type site in the future, but that all depends on user feedback... so get back to me!

A collection of all the money people owe/have paid you and you owe/have paid them

You always could look in your debt tables, but this is a concise summary of all the debts in teh system for you. It is presented in a simple 3x3 matrix on your My Stuff (will only work if you have an account) - that should be relatively clear. You can also see a summary of all of the WhoOwes.Me users by looking on the home page.

• People Owe You$1,960.00
• You Owe People$0.00
• Pending Debts$1,960.00

• They've Paid You$310.00
• You've Paid Them$40.00
• Debts Collected/Paid$270.00

• Total They've Owed$2,270.00
• Total You've Owed$40.00
• Grand Total$2,230.00

New feature from a user suggestion

See... I listen. Now if you accidentally move a debt to paid and you want to move it back, there is a simple move back icon [] that you can click and it will return the debt back to unpaid.

You can register for WhoOwes.Me now

Registration is tested and it is up and running. All it takes is an email address and a password - hell, use a fake one from a place like Mailinator, I don't care, I am not collecting any information. I took a little different approach than many of you are used to as I am not hiding your password as you type it in initially. I did this purely for simplicity so you can see what you are typing in and won't need a confirmation box - a sort of usability experiment I guess. If it sucks, contact me and say something.

How it was done

I made my registration process from scratch. I put up a tutorial for how this is done here: Making a Registration System with Asp.Net and Linq-to_SQL.

*Though I skipped it in the tutorial, your passwords are encrypted in the database.