topics in Brightkite tagged with location

Browsing through some of the privacy ideas here, it seems like a great number of them could be solved simply by attaching a privacy level to individual locations. For instance, when signaling BrightKite that I'm at home, I would have Private mode attached to Home, so before it would notify anything at all to anyone it would set me to private than send the check it that I'm at home (but private). Likewise I could attach public to the Cafe, so when I get to the Cafe from home and checkin at the Cafe it would set everything to public and announce that I'm at the cafe.
This would even solve some of the issues with SMS checkins. I would no longer have to set Public or Private before checking in at a location, I would simply /know/ that as soon as I checked in where I was the appropriate level of privacy would be applied.

ShaBot

It would good to be able to edit placemarks. Currently you can either checkin or delete only.

Could the name of our placemarks be what is passed to twitter? I don't want the universe knowing my location, but my friends know where my home is and if they want to find locations that I check into they can investigate/ask me.

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.

Is there a way? Or can there be a way to publicly mark an address as someone's house or my house? So someone knows I'm at my house or elsewhere instead of just a random address?

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.

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!

In the Around Me page, it would be handy to have a Map view similar to the one you can get when viewing an individual user's locations. Since the checkins are usually long addresses that aren't as intuitive as "3rd and Spring" I don't really process the data that quickly. When I want to know what's going on around me, I want to "look around," not read a list -- and the closer something is to me on the map, the more likely I am to care. If I could see a map of who has checked in around me and posts from the area, that would provide a very handy summary of where I am and what there is to do.

Maybe the map could have a time filter like "Show checkins/posts from the last ( )hour ( )day ( ) week ( ) all time" etc.

Rather than tweet my location, I'd prefer if you updated my location attribute in Twitter.

Check this out: http://twitter.com/rsarver/statuses/7...

How about the ability to get updates from a location?

For Example. I tag an address as a location that I would like to follow. Then when another brightkite user checks in at that location I get a notification?

Can you create more, larger options for the "Around Me" section? I would like to see greater than 4000 meters.

Integrating ping.fm with brightkite would be great. Allows us to blast where we are and status update at the same time.

It would be great to be able to check in from a cross-street. Some times I don't know the exact address, and even so, it's impossible to navigate from just an address without a cross street anyway.

A notification like "Sarah is at Starbucks on 3rd and Madison" is much more useful than "Sarah is at 1019 3rd Ave"

It's really hard to find and add new locations and placemarks from the web UI. Example: I'm about to go to a Starbucks up the street, so I tried typing "Starbucks" into Brightkite's search box. I even tried "Starbucks Westminster, CO." But your web UI can't find that store unless I do something like go to Google Maps in another tab, find that store manually, then copy and paste its address back into Brightkite.

That's really cumbersome.

I see a lot of people checking in to a location that they were already checked in to. I suspect this means they check in in the morning, go to lunch, and then check in again when they get back from wherever they went to lunch.

Seems like a good idea to let people "check out" of a location, if they know they're going to be gone for an extended period but not check in to a new location during that absence. This way, I don't show up somewhere, expecting to see someone who isn't actually there, despite being checked-in.