ScottKoegler's dashboard

Thanks for the update Lesley. Looking forward to the announcement! – Balaji Dutt M V, on August 22, 2008 11:23

Balaji, we are definitely considering users like yourself in regards to this feature. We will make sure that you are able to pull this data across all of the interfaces and not just using SMS or mobile email. :) – Lesley, on August 21, 2008 22:05

Request for Brightkite developers - please consider other options for your international users as well.

For example, sending @FE via text or mobile email might seem like a good answer for your US users. But living in Asia, neither of those really works on a long term basis.

I understand that it's difficult for you to poll FE and am willing to put up with the hassle of having to update BK separately to pick up FE data. But please give us an option via the mobile site as well! – Balaji Dutt M V, on August 21, 2008 02:53

Notsheep, when we first added this feature it was designed to really only work properly with locations at a higher level of accuracy. We realize that this is inconvenient for a lot of people, like yourself, who would like to do this on a broader level. We will go in and modify this feature, but we don't have an ETA just yet. :) – Lesley, on August 19, 2008 21:44

In the US we can specify by our Zip Code and label that. Sometimes the labels don't stick with the address entered a specific way. You might have some luck if you enter "your town, UK [label]" without/instead of the post code. That might help... Sometimes you have to be creative to get it to work just right.

If I use the full postcode, it still pinpoints my street. If I use the first part of the postcode, it says I'm in a different town. It's not a highly-populated area ;-)

What I'd like is to be able to be a bit more vague about my location without being inaccurate, and still use a label. Is there any particular reason BK chose to only allow the label facility for addresses that were street-level or more specific? Why not let people put labels to whatever placemarks they want?

I really like BK, btw. If it would update my Facebook status and work with IWantSandy, it would be nearly perfect :-)

notsheep, you can try using your post code when you create a label. I just pulled one from a business I found in Google Maps and when I put a label on it, it showed up like this:

http://brightkite.com/places/7e4b08d9...

Google's geocoder can be somewhat buggy with overseas locations, so you may not have much more luck with this. We will check to see if we can go in and change it from Great Britain to the UK, since it's Google's data it's not an easy change, but we will look into it.

I like the @FE idea. Until Fire eagle supports pushing. – jiltedcitizen, on August 18, 2008 14:18

I'm trying to set a label for [home], but without putting in a full address (privacy). I can't do it for anything less specific than my street-name, and since there are only seven houses on my street, that's fairly specific...

What I'd like to be able to do is:
a) use a label so I can easily check in from my phone, and
b) have that label show up as something like @home (Northern Ireland)

(Also, every location in Northern Ireland shows up as "Northern Ireland, Great Britain" - but Northern Ireland isn't part of Britain. It's part of the UK, but that's not the same thing.)

Lorree, this is a fairly complicated problem that has to do with how Google's geocoder is handling certain intersections. We are working on a solution for this, but we don't have an ETA at this time. – Lesley, on August 15, 2008 23:28

In some areas, I can label and placemark an intersection, but in other areas I cannot. For instance, I am trying to label an intersection (instead of an address - privacy) yet, when I submit it to search it comes up as "Label: San Francisco, CA" or even "Label: US" has come up as well and not "Label: Fremont Blvd. & Market St., San Francisco, CA". Yet, in different areas, I can make labeled intersections.

Jeevs, you totally nailed it...that is the challenge. – Martin May, on August 15, 2008 03:24

Anyone know what's causing this? I'm using an iPhone with full 3G bars and all my clips are only ~1 second even though the entire time I'm recording it shows upstream speed that seems to go up and down normally like it was really working.

As I understand it, the reason Pownce has no difficulty integrating with FireEagle despite their size is because it only ever needs to know where you are when you post something. So a user action prompts the pull from FE; this is more scalable because it does not have to be happening all the time, only once in a while when you post something.

This is equivalent, in terms of practicality, to the suggestion that BrightKite should prompt the you, when checking in, to just pull from FE (also like @FE mentioned earlier).
I think this is very sensible and, from the sounds of it, feasible.

Some people might want BK to check you in automatically whenever your FE is updated (from Plazes or any other service that pushes your location to FE). This is nice because it means you will only need to check in with one service and all your FE-capable services (e.g BK, Plazes or Pownce) will be updated instantly and automatically.
This is very difficult; because it demands that BK constantly lookup the location of all of its users through FE to make sure they haven't gone from their last check in point.

I think, until FE itself supports pushing relevant data to BK (i.e when a BK user's FE location is updated, FE should let BK know to pull the new geodata), the @FE user-prompted pull is a clever and effective compromise. – jeevs sinclair, on August 14, 2008 09:35

Hi Andy, we are working on 2-way FireEagle integration. With Pownce it is slightly less complicated than what we have to deal with. – Lesley, on August 12, 2008 22:21

How is Pownce doing it then? – Andy Mesa, on August 12, 2008 21:25

Pownce now has two-way FireEagle communication, and they don't purport to be "the location based social network". Aren't they equally as big? Would they not then have the same problem?

Kichigai, we do have plans for that, but no ETA right now. :) – Lesley, on August 11, 2008 16:41

What about implementing an SMS/e-mail interface for that feature? – Kichigai, on August 10, 2008 01:25