Automatic Check-ins == You Win

Further, why do we on a mobile platform need to load two pages to check in? First the location then the check in. It is aggravating. I am trying to use the service but it is not friendly. Please make it friendly.

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.

I liked this idea and the best way to implement this would be to have defined places (with proper geographic boundaries) defined locally in your phone. As regular intervals, the phone would check your current location and compare it to those defined places, if you are within, then you are automatically checked-in.

The only thing missing from BK, is the ability to tag a place as private only so only trusted friends can see you there (like home).

Happy location reporting - Martin

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.