topics in Brightkite tagged with checkin

The single best thing you could do for BrightKite is make checking in automatic, so my phone *totally automatically* tells my friends where I am. I want the service to be invisible. I'm constantly forgetting to check into my new places, and it seems silly that I need to remember to do so in order to make good use of the service. It's a huge weakness.

Playing with Brightkite makes me realize how siloed all the technologies in my phone are. My Blackberry Curve has GPS, so theoretically I should be able to give Brightkite (or any other app) permission to use that data, and then automatically check in just by posting a note or photo. I believe cell-phone tower triangulation can be used much the same way.

This is a really broad question, then. Is this something you guys see as feasible in any kind of near term? That would be really cool, especially since the SMS check-in seems to require very specific types of information- like street name and number.

Thanks! I'm having fun with it.

I want the ability to check OUT (aka "going off the grid") as well as checking in.

Obviously 14 hrs later I am still not at my favorite coffee shop down the street. But I don't necessarily want to say the new place I'm at (home, date, new coffee shop trying to get serious work done). This should be as easy as flipping the privacy switch on the homepage or clicking the lock button on the upper right of the iPhone interface.

I love your service and love that I get to watch it evolve daily. Keep up the kickass work!

If you offered a "future check-in" you could put Dopplr out of business. It seems like that would be a great addition to your platform for people who travel frequently.

Users could see where their friends were going and make plans.

It would be nice if we could toggle if a checkin is public or private, OR have the ability to mark a location as "Always Private".

My biggest gripe with brightkite is having to delete checkins because I forgot to toggle my private status before I checkin at my house, and/or, forgetting to toggle when I leave my house and marking places private that can be public.

Here's a proposed UI improvement for checking in and going private:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryj...

Right now it's extremely problematic that this is a separate/two-stage process. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. when I check in somewhere, Brightkite broadcasts that immediately to my friends. If I want that location to be private, and click the slider, it would have been too late -- my location would already be revealed (yes, this has happened to me).
2. If I need to click the privacy toggle FIRST and THEN checkin, I'm confused, because I might not want the previous place where I was to be made private! Confusing!

The issue is that you've confused state with location, or separated them in an unnatural/uncomfortable way. Really when you change locations, you also want to change your privacy option -- or have the option to do so. When you save a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, you have the option to make the bookmark private, AS YOU ARE SAVING IT, not after you broadcast it to everyone!

Anyway, check out my proposed UI. It needs work, but should start the conversation.

I find that I'm often hanging out at certain places with friends. Rather than all of us each checking in individually, it would kind of be cool to check-in with or for friends.

For example, if I go to a party and show up with a friend, I'd like to check in for both of us (why should my friend need to pull out her cell as well?). The SMS syntax could be:

@Ritual Roasters +username1 +username2

Now, whether you automatically push out that update to your friends' friends is open for discussion, but I imagine that if my friend has marked me as a friend on Brightkite, it could be an opt-in permission that I set: "Let my friends check in for me." "Only let my trusted friends check in for me."

And, when I visit my dashboard, I would see a message to confirm the check in permanently: "Your friend [username] checked you in to Ritual Roasters four hours ago. Were you there? Yes / No"

How about IM update from GTalk in the same mode as the email updates. For those of us on the move who can't use SMS yet, but can access GTalk (e.g. from Blackberry 8000 series etc.), it would seem like a reasonable halfway house. Email is OK, but I don't fancy having a load of sent messages in my work mail account when I could just be banging an XMMP message Brightkite's way :)

Create global shortnames for all the main airports. Trying to check into PDX (Portland's main airport) this morning was a pain in the ass.

I would like to be able to just send:

@pdx

I love Brightkite's ability to cross-post to Twitter. It allows me to start using Brightkite with little or no additional effort even though other people I know aren't using it yet. I do have one concern though. The current controls for what gets propagated from Brightkite to Twitter don't quite mirror my own preferences. If I sent as much as I'd like to Brightkite, I'd end up spamming my Twitter friends.

I have two ideas for dealing with the problem. First is per-type throttling-- no more than N messages of a given type for each M minutes (or hours). Or just restrict N to 1. That is, my first photo (or whatever) will be Twittered, but then no more for some number of hours.

The second approach would be to have some syntax for exceptions in crossposting. Eg, normally I want my photos crossposted to Twitter, but not this one I am sending right now. Normally I don't want my checkins crossposted, but I'll make an exception for my current location.

Make sense?

Does (or will, and if so, when) Brightkite support checkin or notification via IM? Twitter supports this and it's great to use in both directions. Also saves on SMS count for those of us with limited SMS.