groovinkim's dashboard

in the past people using dodgeball just chose the nearest city... ie people who lived in bellevue or kirkland or whatever would still choose "seattle". that approach isn't as technically accurate, though

in the past with dodgeball the reason you chose a city was so that you would only get sms messages when you were in that city.

for example, i have friends in seattle, portland, san francisco and nyc who all used dodgeball. when i'm at home in seattle, none of my nyc friends really care to get sms messages telling them that i'm at linda's... it's not like they are going to hop a flight and join me ;)

however, i go and visit nyc once in awhile, so when i was there i would change my city to nyc and then my nyc friends would see that i was in a bar in brooklyn and my friends in seattle would not have to get a text message with that mostly useless to them information

that feature already exists in the iphone app... not sure if it works the same way it used to on sms though. have you tried it?

i would really like to see the crush feature added on foursquare. even though it never worked for me on dodgeball (a bunch of people had crushes supposedly, but i only ever got an alert once) i still thought it was cool

yeah, although there's a place where you can submit the info via email to update a venue, i think it'd be a lot faster if foursquare just trusted users to edit it correctly. i don't think there would ever be an issue with a malicious person randomly putting in wrong addresses, and as long as the system kept a log of what the previous address was and who changed it (similar to a wiki) it could always be rolled back if that situation ever arose.

it'd also be significantly less work... nobody wants to go through and manually update a bunch of addresses from emails that people send. it's boring

well, you can see anyone's friend list on twitter too. you just go to them and click following. i don't really see any privacy issue with this since people can still set their twitter stream to private and since they also would have to approve your friend request on foursquare

i think that'd dramatically decrease the userbase. many of my friends who used dodgeball are not very technically inclined people. they only use the service via sms and don't even have phones with data plans.

but i'd have no problem with ads being displayed in a tasteful way (a la twitteriffic) or with there being some promotional stuff for sale like t-shirts or stickers.

ack, sorry... after further grilling a friend via IM, i misunderstood their problem. apparently the issue is one that you likely already know about... when i check in from one of the places that is not already in brightkite's database (for example, oddfellows - http://www.yelp.com/biz/oddfellows-ca...) or my house, which is one of my placemarks, they aren't seeing the name.

it just occurred to me that from what i can tell you guys just pull from google, so i could just add the missing places to google maps myself. i just did that for oddfellows.

my friends don't have data on their phones though, so they wouldn't be able to go to google and submit that data while they're out and about. so they need a way to check in via sms using the name of a place which does not yet exist in the database. dodgeball would let users do this, keep a record of the name they'd used, and then they could go back later on and when they added the place via the web it would automatically link it to their checkin.

this has probably already been floated as a suggestion and i missed it, but it would definitely mollify them if they were allowed to check in via a name that doesn't exist yet.

there could also be a public running list of places that people had signed in from that don't exist in the database yet, and a link to google local and a description of how they could add that place to the google database themselves. that way people who have free time on their hands could be put to work entering locations in the database and it'd make brightkite easier to use for everyone ;)

in dodgeball everyone was used to checking in from their house to indicate that they wanted people to come over. a lot of us live in large houses (ie i have 6 roommates) and we regularly host movie nights, video game nights, etc. so for example i'd check in from zhouse with a comment, and dodgeball would send all my friends @zhouse, 988 21st ave, "come over and watch movies at 8pm!"

unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to do this on brightkite... nobody sees my placemark names, they just get the address.

ah yes, i'm xaotica. http://brightkite.com/people/xaotica

for me personally that would not be all that useful since most of the time my facebook status updates aren't specifically related to a geographic place that i'm in.

i live in seattle and would love to see more seattle people using the service. but since brightkite is geared more towards technically inclined people, i feel like advertising online would probably bring in more users than advertising in the print paper. all the cool papers mentioned have online advertising.

indeed... i'm in the same boat. i have ~120 dodgeball using friends who are seeking a new permanent service, but right now they aren't willing to commit to converting to brightkite and this is one of the reasons.