topics in Brightkite tagged with friends

Custom alias for locations would be useful for my friends to understand where I am. Especially with twitter turned on! Personally, I know two addresses: My home address and the address I grew up in. I don't expect my friends to know either of them :)

Of course, they can still find those details by visiting the location page.

how about being able to add friends/find friends from:
gmail
yahoo
pownce
friendfeed
facebook
flickr
vimeo

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"

Privacy settings should allow a user to define who can see their friend's list. For instance, if a user sets his posts/checkins to only be viewable by friends and trusted friends, everyone can still see their list of friends. For true privacy, there needs to be an option on whether your friends list is viewable and by whom.

This is important to be truly private. I have a friend who has been stalked online at other various social network sites and the stalker was contacting her "friends" and causing issues. Locking down the friends list would help reduce the likelihood of this happening.

the iPhone app is great (works faster than any iPhone web app yet!), but I want more. Specifically, I want to be able to send an address (the location of a friend etc) to the Google map application so that I can get driving directions from where I am to where they are.

When the 2nd gen iPhone comes out you guys had better work GPS into the mix ;)

Forgive me if I'm just missing this feature, but it does me absolutely no good to know that my friends checked into my city. Perhaps they aren't close enough friends to want to give me their exact location (especially until you guys get the "always private" tag worked out), but they would be comfortable giving out slightly more information than just the city.

For example, divide the city into blocks or some other smaller division. That way, for those people who don't want me to necessarily know their *exact* location, I can at least know that we're on the same block/street/neighborhood/within x distance/etc.

Is this already available and I'm just missing it?

Thank you!

Twitter importing of friends takes a very long time. My suggestion as a UI professional, and frustrated user is to allow multiple friend requests at once. This could be done as a series of checkboxes next to each user.

find friends using brightkite through email address book (integrate with gmail, others)

I'd like to see an additional map: area view to zoom in on local friends without trying to "aim" google maps. I am lucky enough to have friends all over the US but most of the time I want to use the map to see those within 10 to 20 miles of my current location. Since the map now defaults to the entire country, I end up spending lots of time zooming in on the Chicago area. This takes enough time that I am beginning to avoid the map all together.
Thanks for considering it!

On the Find Your Friends page, it would be nice if each person had a check box beside their profile. I could then check the friends that I want and do one global invite. Having to weed through a tone of friends pulled in from twitter one at a time is a little painful.

Right now I can specify how close someone has to be for a proximity notification globally, but there are reasons you'd want to have different values in different situations.

1. There are some people whom I would like to see notifications for even if they are further away. (I.e. most of my friends.)

2. A few blocks is a reasonable distance in the city, but not so much in the burbs, and pretty ridiculous in the country. You might want to try and scale that automatically based on population density.