This jerk near me won't update his location

So some guy from about 20 miles south of here recently visited a location my area (4000 meters). He went home, and is still posting update 'messages'. I get every one. He's announcing that he's going to some location, but he never updates from that location. This is really annoying, and I've tried to contact him to say, hey, update your location, but he seems to be ignoring me. That's great fun, to see a ton of messages from this jerk who thinks brightkite is like twitter in that you OCCASIONALLY tell it where you are and just update no matter what.

There needs to be a "This guy is doin' it wrong" button, so you can send him a message saying "Hey, you're posting messages to a location you are not at and have not been at for a week, fix your location". Even if he just fixed cities (he lives 2 cities away) that would be good enough.

Also, it would be neat if some locations could have a time limit. You can't stay at a movie theater overnight, for example, and you would be auto checked out if you were still listed as being there for 24 hours. This allows it to cover people who work at a theater, as well as people who are just seeing a movie.

One solution is ignoring everyone around me just so I don't get updates from this one guy who doesn't know how to use BrightKite. Another is to block him, which is going to happen very soon. But I don't think he's going to be the first or the last to not really understand the idea of posting messages to a location.

I’m annoyed

Inappropriate?

Reply to this discussion

Follow this discussion to get notifications on your dashboard.

EMPLOYEE

Inappropriate?
Delete or Edit (for 15 minutes)

Lesley, Employee, replied on July 11, 2008 20:14

Hi Thomas, unfortunately there's not much we can do in this situation. You can try a couple different things: modify your nearby radius to include a smaller area where his posts won't show, disable nearby notifications for posts, or you can just block him. We'll think about possibly adding some sort of time limit for locations in the future.

1 Comment Add a comment
I understand, that's why I made a thread about it, trying to think of ways to take care of people who don't understand what brightkite is about. – Thomas, on July 11, 2008 20:34
Inappropriate?
Delete or Edit (for 15 minutes)

raven replied on July 12, 2008 04:23

Brightkite's notes bother me a little in regards to location. Let's say I checkin to a local park, and post a note to that location. Thinking about notes like Twitter's updates, the notes might not directly relate to the park. Let's say I write "Nice flowers at the park" and then later write "Going out for food in a little bit!" which might be useful to my friends reading around that time, but months later someone else visiting the first note makes sense but the second doesn't.

Now one comment alone isn't a tragedy, but a popular place like Golden Gate Park could potentially have hundreds of notes that don't make "location sense". Thomas' problem above would still be a problem if that location happen to be the other guy's house or work where he commented a lot.

If Brightkite notes are to be equivalent to Twitter tweets, then I think there needs to be an option to have notes free of location (they could still be read by finding the person), and that option might be the default. If notes are to be sort of comments about a location only, then that should be made more clear, and perhaps reconsider how Brightkite and Twitter interact.

It doesn't bother me all the time, but the places I go right now tend to have no or few notes, and I suspect even if there were a lot, I'd just glance over the few most recent and ignore the rest. It's more a conceptual problem I guess. :)

I’m unsure

2 Comments Add a comment
You make good points, and if I could, I would mark your post "This is one of the best ideas" – Thomas, on July 12, 2008 11:47
Something we are considering in the future is a way to classify a post...ie general comment, review etc... – Brady (Official Rep), on July 15, 2008 21:46