Recently active topics in Brightkite tagged with map

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.

It would be nice if there was a setting to optionally display friends on the friend map.
Similar to how we can decide if our friends appear on our friend stream or not.

There are lots of people I would like to friend all over the world, but when I go to the friend map I would rather just see my local friends.

There's gotta be a better way to check in on your location on your mobile phone. I'm just using brightkite since yesterday. Today I went out on a local bike path and took a picture that I wanted to post. I could not search for this because it wasn't an address. I searched for the name of the trail, but that didn't work.

My thought is that there should either be some integration between brightkite and an internal gps receiver if available, or at least some way to access latlong coordinates through a more dynamic mapping tool, either via mobile browser or via the mobile version of Google maps. Optimally, I'd like to just bring up a map, zoom into my exact location, hit my screen to put a pin down, then have options to check in, placemark, post photo, etc. The current interface seems awfully clunky unless you are only using it to locate yourself at specific street addresses.

I was just thinking how cool it would be if BrightKite showed what the weather is like in any given location. It doesn't have to be overlayed over the map (if that's even possible), just shown on location pages and maybe the pages of people who are currently checked in somewhere.

I'm assuming it wouldn't be too hard to implement, and I think it would be a pretty cool feature.

Any thoughts?

Since I assume you are looking into establishing groups. I would suggest allowing multiple groups in a single location, groups that comprise more than one location. Additionally, the founders of the group could choose to allow anonymous posting of alerts and messages....why is this relevant.....Let us say a church would like to establish a group where members could post prayer requests for family members, world peace, etc....the anonymous postings might make people more comfortable sharing items that are somewhat personal.

Also I would suggest that you have a link on Google maps somewhere....I assume many users are like myself and search for directions to a location, discover locations, and search for places they can't correctly spell on Google first. You could make it like Brightkite this location sort of deal.

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!

I love this so far, and everything seems to be here, but the one thing I was expecting and don't see is the option for a map view of a user's stream, so that you could see things like the location of a post on the map as well as photos on a location on the map. I imagine being able to scroll in a bubble on a location and see all posts/photos chronologically attributed to a particular location. Please add this! Thanks in advance!

It would be very handy if it were possible to put a marker on the map itself instead of having to type an address, drag and drop style.
This would be good for editing locations as well.
It happened to me a street wasn't recognised, and then this function could come in handy.

Be great to have a pop-up, fly-out (?) aerial map so I can see where my friends are that are distant (ie: I'm in NY but have many friends scattered across the US). If I could adjust the zoom level (kite height?) that's be peachy.