Automatic Check-ins == You Win

This is possible on iPhone when the SDK is released, but not before. There are also privacy implications. It would need to ask before checking in, unless you had trusted places or something. The other holdup is, the iPhone Google Maps location is not always perfectly accurate. It's pretty close, usually down to a few blocks, but not exact. This could lead to problems as half of the coolness is seeing if people are in the same place as you.

With a Brightkite desktop widget, anyone with a Bluetooth enabled phone and computer could have this happen automatically when they walked into the house (or within range of the computer).

Well I'm sure that by using Sailling Clicker (http://www.salling.com/Clicker/mac/) that would be very easy to implement with some AppleScript. I might give it a go.

Alternatively, a native client could sense that you're at a new location and popup a notification that says "We've detected that you're in a new place, would you like to tell your friends? [Yes | No]" Etc.

Having looked at this problem in-depth over the course of the last few years, I know that this is a horrible, messy idea to implement. You need software for each cellphone platform, and you need server implementations that are different for every provider. Cell providers don't make it easy to give up location data.

That said, somebody needs to do it. Whoever does will own the social LBS space.

iPhone Core Location FTW. Can't wait for one-click checkin!

This would be great, but tricky to implement cross-platform. Privacy is also obviously a concern.

I really like the idea of defining trusted places. That's sort of like the idea in other topics of having privacy settings assigned to placemarks.

This is - of course - the ultimate idea. Enough defeatism about how hard it is to do, how many problems there will be along the way, all the concerns, etc. Of course there will be issues, obstacles, concerns. User opt-in, automatic/simple location-updating is quite simply inevitable. Too many of us are working on it. The question is: Who MOST WANTS IT to happen? That list may not be as long as the nay-sayers list, but it's the one I'm signed up for. I can't imagine that's not where the folks at Brightkite don't want to be as well.

Great Idea, Josh Lewis.

I think a good first step would be to have BrightKite accept coordinates as a check in rather than it only looking for addresses. If BK could accept that then people in the open source community could create software for each phone independantly that will read coordinates from GPS and then automatically send a text message every X mins. This concept would be great because the software for the phones could be used for many different purposes and BK would be accepting (and starting) a universal standard.

I just started a new topic on this point and then found this one, so I am reposting here as well.

It seems like the privacy issues could be avoided if the location is part of a Note/photo sent. I.e. the Note is the checkin. If you don't want to be "seen" somewhere, don't post.

My phone has GPS and I'd love to see BK use that to update my location automatically based on where I am when I send the Note.

I just managed to setup Navizon on my iPhone so that it updates fireeagle every 10 mins, then I hooked up that to Brightkite, and now if I go to the sharing tab on my brightkite accunt it does say that fireeagle thinks I am logged somewhere. But there doesn't seem to be a way to:

1 - just click there and checkin to that address
2 - have it to automatically check-in everytime my address is updated on fireeagle.

Having to maually check in defeats the whole purpose of using fireeagle to centrally control your location. Fireeagle's concept is to have multiple application updating and reading a central location point, imagine if each of these applications required that you manually set the location in them?!

Please add this ASAP!!

I've been requesting a read from FireEagle from quite some time now. The BrightKite are saying it is in the roadmap but we do not seem to get a straight answer as to when it would be implemented. I completely stopped using BK until this is done as I do not want to update my location in 20 different spots.

Let's spread this feature request. Use:

http://tinyurl.com/5oa4lg

on your posts about it on brightkite.

Here's some interesting background reading on location-based services and how hard it is to work with the carriers:

http://tinyurl.com/69fyqr (Venturebeat written by Skydeck founder)
http://tinyurl.com/3hubjk (Techcrunch by Loopt founder)

Sounds like a tough job, guys. Keep chipping away at it!

I have to be that one guy who disagrees. After tweeting multiple times daily for... at *least* a year, it's no trouble whatsoever to checkin when I move. Fast WiFi in most cities coupled with a not-too-slouchy job of making the site speedy to respond on your end makes it, mostly, a breeze. I'd personally prefer the service remained manual - having notifications pop up when somebody happened to walk or drive by a place where I was, instead of when somebody *was actually at* a place I was, would make this service useless for me. Here's an idea: Instead, track people's locations... but don't check them in. When they've been still in the same place for like 15 minutes, send them a text "Do you want to check in at *insert guessed location here*?". On an iPhone, the software could take care of this query, so it doesn't even cost a text message. This lets the users continue to be precise, while letting them be automatically reminded/assisted in checking in by the GPS.

I am not advocating for only auto check-in but for different levels of customization, most certainly for choosing between auto or manual check in. But possibly, as I was discussing with some brightkite folks, to be able to distinguish betwee auto and manual check-ins also on the receiving end.

So elliottcable, you should be able to specify whether you want to be notified of no check-ins, manual check-ins or auto check-ins in an increasing volume of notifications.

Christian Rauh I guess it makes sense to try to compromise - but that reduces the number of... 'useful people' in the system? Does that make sense? People who auto check-in would, in essence, be 'useless' as a contribution to the system, from the point of view of those who are only interested in the social-location aspect of Brightkite - without contributing accurate location information, it's impossible for them to contribute to the virtual people-web that will inevitably form as Brightkite grows.

Of course, it'd be fine for people you actually know; I'm fine with knowing if my mate is in the general location, I'd call him up and hook up or something if I so desired. But as a social network, with a purpose of allowing disparate internet denizens to meet based on some similarity or relation (in this case, physical location), it fails where it relates to inaccurate data from auto-updating systems - in such a case as the automatic systems themselves are inaccurate, of course.

If someone had access to a truly accurate system - such as an external GPS unit instead of the one in their phone (assuming the one in the iPhone will be as inaccurate as the ones in the Windows Mobile devices I've seen), then this wouldn't be a problem. In that case, the auto-updates could be treated as manual check-ins.

elliottcable said: "If someone had access to a truly accurate system - such as an external GPS unit instead of the one in their phone... then this wouldn't be a problem."

We're going on the _assumption_ that the GPS systems in use to do automatic checkins are sufficiently accurate. Getting into the nitty gritty of which devices are able to get coordinates that are accurate to within how many meters is not a part of this idea, and is left to good implementation. It doesn't need to be discussed here. (I understand the ideas are related functionally, but they are entirely separate topics.)

Again, the central idea here as stated above by me and others is that if you are sufficiently near a check-in point that is already known, you can be assumed to be there, and you will check in at that location automatically. As it's already been said, many people wouldn't want even their friends to know their location at every second of the day. I'd prefer that my friends can know when I'm at one of these five locations. Other than that, I want to be invisible. I don't envision driving down the street and "checking in" every 100 feet as I drive. That's not part of this idea.

There's also a possibility that if you roam outside the tolerance range of your check-in point (perhaps set by user-specific preferences?), you check out, and your location is unknown until you manually check in or come within range of another known check-in point.

I think that there are a few ways that brightkite's checkin can work:

0 - Current way: manually check in only, currently through typed address in sms, in the future though 1 click on device app.

1 - Elliotcable's way: receive an sms notification after you stayed more than 15 minutes at the same location asking if you would like to check in there.

2 - Josh's way: you manually setup placemarks and you are automatically checked in when you are close enough to any of those placemarks. The daily routine of home-work-home would fall well into this scenario.

3 - Chris + Elliotcable's mashup way: auto check-in whenever you stay put more than 15 mins at the same location. This will check you in wherever you go but will avoid check ins along the way. Should reduce some of the notification overload.

3 - Chris's way: you automatically check-in to a place every certain amount of time/distance if you moved from where you were before. Generates a lot of messages, but is useful for bike rides and other events where route is interesting to transmit (crazy bar hoping night outs? :-) )

I don't think that the developers need to choose one of the above, instead, brightkite should aim to implement a method where ALL of the above are possible configurations. With simple default and very private settings (1 maybe) for starting novice users and then advanced settings that would allow greater and fine grained configuration of auto-checking.

The more control and application gives the user the better. No two users are alike and the more options the more likely someone will find a use for the system. Also, by giving a lot of options, Brightkite fosters innovation and emergence of new usage patterns instead of trying to lock the users into the initial designed behavior pattern.

The drawback of excessive control is that excessive freedom can be overwhelming for novice users. So there should def be progressive methods of getting into deeper setting that novice users should not be confronted with unless they feel like going into them.

Great compromises - now:
π (3.1.41592) - Mega Mashup: Devs implement GPS location updating. You have three options in your account if you've checked in from GPS before. One being the default, is checking in manually still, but from the GPS-enabled application on your phone - therefore guessing where you automatically. Essentially no different than the current system, but with the GPS helping you check-in faster (but still manually). Once back at your computer after getting the GPSware installed, you'll have a new profile setting - a checkbox for two and a checkbox for three. The second checkbox is "Do you want to automatically be checked in when you arrive at favourite placemarks?" if checked, things work as Josh suggested above. Finally, you can check off "Do you want to automatically be checked in when you have arrived at your destination?" If this last one is checked, you will be queried as I described - by ping from the GPS application, or by SMS, or however you want, it's up to you, the user is queried after being 'stopped' for a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the query is nothing more than a reminder - "Hey! You've been here a while, why don't you check in?" - or perhaps it tries to guess your location "Hey, you look like you've arrived at Foo Bar Inc. Are you staying here (1) or are you staying at a different place nearby (2)?".

This solves the novice user problem - the default is to just make the GPS facilitate the current check-in environment.

I think it would be a good idea to make it possible to write in places you're visiting them the morning, night, week and even month before you're visiting them, so they update automatically at a set time/day without you having to come onto the website, or send a text message.

i want to be able to go to my Windows Mobile Brightkite app (a native app), and have it guess the vicinity for me.

if it's near a placemark, ask me--"you're close to [placemark name]", want to check in?

if it's not, give a general area name, and ask to check in

if that's not what we want, fall back to a normal search (however you want to implement)

i haven't messed with the Google API, let alone know if there's one for the mobile app, but the hoi polloi may be able to come up with this, now that i think about it--but i'd appreciate it more if it came from brightkite ;-)

j.