Recently active problems in Brightkite tagged with friends

I can not find my friends on Twitter. Apparently Brite Kite is having problems talking to Twitter. This has been an issue since last evening. When I try to find my twitter friends in britekite, I get the following message.."Sorry, but we had trouble contacting Twitter. Are they slow/down? Maybe try again later..."

The following three posts are showing up twice in my friend stream:

http://brightkite.com/objects/a8a0210...
http://brightkite.com/objects/e9a3421...
http://brightkite.com/objects/fc81934...

Not really a huge problem, just kind of annoying. Funny thing is that all the comments for these posts are in sync.

I seem to be unable to block users. I've blocked two friends as a test, but the checkins and posts for both show up in my friendfeed and location feeds, regardless. How is blocking supposed to supercede other settings? Or, rather than blocking, how about a mute feature for people?

I might be an odd case, but when you have LOTS of friend requests, it's really annoying that the WHOLE page refreshes when you add a friend! It takes you out of flow, and it also wastes time... could you do the adding friend thing via AJAX?

I keep getting updates from people who aren't my friend! I've got my notification setting set to "neighborhood" and "friends" yet I keep getting updates from non-friends when checked in at work. There are 40,000 people who work where I work, I don't want to hear from all of them...

Scenario:

I receive a friend request from someone I don't necessarily know or know that well, but I add them anyway, and I *uncheck* sending their updates to my friend-stream. Their updates show up anyway.

In order to remove them from my friend-stream I have to go to "Friends" and then edit the friendship settings again, then save them. This removes them from my friend stream while maintaining them as a friend.

When running "discover friends" it displays people I have already invited (and either did not respond or declined) to be my friend. Am I bugging them by "re-inviting" them? Can they be excluded (aka be seen as having been invited already)?

Sending an invite to someone should not automatically imply that I want to be their friend.

One of the great things about Twitter is its non-symmetrical friends system. People can follow me without me *having* to follow them back.

Any chance of something similar on Brightkite? There are people I don't mind sharing my location with who I don't necessarily wnt cluttering up my friendstream.