lisamac's dashboard

Same for me. Please resolve this, Twitter!

It looks like what you want is actually this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pingpressfm/ Note: I did not write that plugin, nor am I affiliated with it in any way. – Matt Jacob, on August 14, 2008 22:02

hI Matt, I'm not sure if that is what I was trying to do. I'm interested in My Post FROM a WordPress Blog, posting TO Ping.FM, which then, of course post to the other sites. I didn't see in the Plug in you sent me that it would be doing that. Thanks for keeping in touch. Hal – hal, on August 14, 2008 19:36

Just in case you didn't see the other thread(s) started by different people, the mythical plugin you speak of now exists. We're at version 0.9.4 and getting better every day, with 1.0.0 scheduled for the end of this month.

Drink down the sweet, sweet Kool-Aid right here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p...

Just happened to me. What are we supposed to do?

air because it is lightweight is the only reason i can think of. doesnt really need to be that complex. just need some kinf of app or widget i think.

I believe most services are starting to charge $.20 per text message (without a plan, or over an existing plan) starting around September. This is some serious laundry money you're expecting your friends to pick-up. – Craig Maloney, on July 15, 2008 12:31

I think you need something a tad more "heroic" at this point than a nice man in a shirt and tie coming to say "we're truly sorry". This is something that could make-or-break the company. You need something along the lines of removing tainted products off the shelves and being forthcoming with your customers, ala Tylenol, rather than trying to shuffle the problem under the carpet ala Intel with the Pentium release. You need to show up as knights in shining armor and not only admit you were wrong, but also make people feel safer and happier for using your product. If you care at all that people still use your product, you need to do nothing less of a full turn-around on this issue. – Craig Maloney, on July 15, 2008 12:29

(scribbles note to self ... do NOT send Loopt invite to Merlin.. scribble..scribble)

Well... I think a little message in the iPhone interface (I saw it someplace on the site I think) Please only invite folks that will want to join ... errr.. or something like that. I'm pretty sure that the only folks that received my invites were people that I had listed in my addressbook ... and only people that I had contact info.

Also, I pretty positive that you couldn't "accidently" give out your location. (You'd have to join... download the software ... start up the application ... check in ...etc.. etc..)

... adding an opt out of any further invites would be a good move.

KJB

Hey all. If you're upset just report the issue to your carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.). The shortcode will shortly be decommissioned and your problems will be solved. You might even get a refund for the TXT messages you received.

All other issues aside, failure to implement "help" and "stop" and "stop all" is cause for immediate cessation of service. In this case your cellphone company is actually your friend! :)

I know this b/c I've been through the process of getting a shortcode provisioned. Carriers are VERY serious about this stuff. SMS is their cash cow and they'll do anything to prevent it from turning spammy (and risk people shutting it off).

Good luck!

BT

Com'on GS.com, go ahead and remove the poster's "inflammatory" statements, but please leave the awesomely hilarious double polo shirt picture. If that's how the Loopt guy chooses to appear in public, who are we to say no? – Nathan Bowers, on July 15, 2008 06:36

I'm with pretty much everyone else on this one. As we interact and share more personal information with all these exciting new technologies, its more important than ever to have super-strict, well thought out ways to control who has access to your and your friend's data.

Things were muddy enough when web-services started encouraging people to enter their email login info to scrape for people to invite, but especially considering 1) the real money cost of SMS and 2) the phone/sms is one of the last bastions of "old media" contact, and still plays by all the same rules.

Its one thing for Loopt to have made this mistake, its another to do nothing about it, and takes things to a whole new level of absurdity when they start blaming the user and making it our responsibility to opt-out of something many of us never wanted to be part of in the first place.

So! I signed up for Loopt because I want a service to replicate the experience from Dodgeball (which lost many of its few users out in San Francisco around a year ago when Google bought it and let it stagnate). I specifically want to dip into a page that tells me where my friends are, so I can decide where to go when I feel like going out but have no plans of my own.

So I joined Loopt because it sounded like Dodgeball without the need to manually enter the name of the place I'm at. I don't want to be constantly tracked, but I do want to tap my phone once and have my location registered. Not everyone is into this; I am.

Loopt lets me invite friends. It marks all the people on my phone's contact list whose carriers support Loopt; it also marks the people who already use Loopt. The only people it automatically wanted to invite, as far as I could tell, were those already using Loopt. And even then I was able to uncheck some of those people before I sent an invitation. So far, the only people who've accepted invitations from me are people I know I invited.

A day or two later, people start complaining about getting a text message. Now I agree that this can be quite annoying, especially when it comes from several people, or from someone you don't particularly like. It also sounds more annoying to get it from a corporate shortcode than from the number of the recipient.

But really? Long-term, this is the tiniest possible blip. A few people will send Loopt invitations, then Britekite will release their app and everyone will switch (Loopt works fine but more of the "early adopter" crowd is already registered with Britekite), and no one will talk about Loopt again outside of terrible conferences attended by Seesmic and Mahalo and Plaxo and whatnot.

As for the cost, any amount is too much but jesus, it's what, ten cents? Is this not the very definition of Merlin's own term, the First World Problem?

So! Loopt is boring, whiners are boring, I'm boring myself here so I'm gonna go watch some videos of Merlin to cheer up.

Loopt is now completing a solution that allows any non-Loopt user to "blacklist" their phone number, to prevent receipt of future friend-invitation messages. Once it is available, we can add your number to the list. Just send an email to support@loopt.com.

So in order to protect my privacy and remove my data from your service, I have to supply you with my data so you can then store it in some huge database that will get pinged any time someone sends invites? That's like calling up my local evangelical religious organization, giving them my address, and asking them to "promise" they'll never visit me again unless something changes in their organization's bylaws that permits door-to-door harassment again.

It also gives no explanation as to why people we've never given our numbers out to somehow, invited us to Loopt. And I thought MPAA guidelines stated that all mobile advertisements must have a way to opt out in the same message?

I just love the fact that the company says that their response answers the question, even though people have asked for a more thorough explanation of “routine conveyance.”

What's with the quotation marks anyway. They typically connote quoted speech, irony or altered-usage, but never emphasis.

Thanks for your patience with this issue. Loopt users may invite friends to the service from Loopt on their phone or Loopt.com. In both cases, users personally choose to which contacts they would like to send these Loopt invitations. After a user selects or inputs contact numbers to invite, Loopt routinely conveys invitations to the user’s intended recipients. Loopt’s “routine conveyance” of these invitations on behalf of users complies with relevant laws and best practices.

Loopt does recognize that many non-Loopt users would like to block receipt of such invites at the point Loopt conveys these messages. So, we must balance the desires of users to send messages to known contacts while respecting the desires of recipients to not receive invitations. Loopt is now completing a solution that allows any non-Loopt user to “blacklist” their phone number, to prevent receipt of future friend-invitation messages. Once it is available, we can add your number to the list. Just send an email to support@loopt.com. We do apologize for any unwanted invitations you have received from Loopt users, and encourage you to contact those sending the invitations to make them aware of your preference to not receive text messages of this kind.

Thank you for the feedback,
Loopt
support@loopt.com

While I can understand anger at getting sent messages you feel you haven't asked for, I think it may be crossing into big-meany territory to post a picture of someone and call them names. Please know that we regularly remove posts like this that violate our community guidelines, specifically those seem to be "attacking people personally." Those guidelines are available here: http://getsatisfaction.com/community_guidelines – Eric Suesz, on July 15, 2008 00:05