Recently active topics in Brightkite tagged with interface

I had a friend sign up for Brightkite yesterday and when he got to this screen, he expected to put in a Twitter-like message:



Brightkite didn't know exactly what he meant, and so checked him in to a Westin somewhere in Ohio. I think you might try to make it more clear that you're looking for a geo-location -- rather than a tweet-like status update.

There are too many page loads for the iphone/ipod touch brightkite interface, i would like to be able to check in on the main page. EDGE reloads are very tedious.

A large percentage of the time, seeing relative timestamps in Brightkite ("1 minute ago", "3 hours ago") for checkins/posts is just fine. Occasionally, however, it'd be nice to see the exact time that an event occurred, particularly once you start getting into days and months in the past.

May I humbly suggest including a mouseover on timestamps that includes the exact date and time of a checkin/post? This way, the more obsessive among us (me) can get our craving for details satisfied, while the existing interface is preserved.

Thanks!
-John

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.

It would really help me add friends if I could see what the person's real name was (as well as their username).



(Related topic: http://getsatisfaction.com/brightkite...)

If you're not going to provide a direct search box for people on the Friends page, might I suggest that you default the main triple-search to People? I start typing someone's name in the box to find a friend, and I end up on some person-named place!