When I get my iPhone, I plan on checking out that site they showed in the keynote that uses live GPS location data - Loopt, I think.

Thanks for your response.

I misunderstood how the question mark thing works. I thought it was a separate syntax for checking in at a business. I didn’t know about the distance confirmation, although I did encounter it when I attempted to check in from Sunnyvale the day before yesterday. Is there a way to turn off the confirmation? Can I SMS “location change no-confirm” or something? In the San Francisco Bay Area, 30 miles isn’t very far (unless, like, most of my friends, you live in San Francisco — in which case, a mile is far). But, it would be impossible to check metro areas and which places would be included in any particular area (even here in the Bay Area, there’d be disagreement about how far out the area goes).

I agree that the Plazes UI is pretty terrible. But, I like their check in method: “at starbucks on 82nd ave nw in edmonton, ab, canada”. It’s easy and could work for geotagging.

Dodgeball actually lets you check in anywhere. It just won’t put you on the map. Any user can add points to the map, but it is limited to major metro areas. That makes me sad.

So, if there’s a place in your database and I want to check in, say at the aforementioned “Bayside Market”, I have to check in to San Francisco, then ?Bayside Market or I have to @Bayside Market, 120 Brannan St, San Francisco.

I like your UI and I think you’re going to go far, but I became inadvertently perplexed by the complexity and frustrating quagmire of the check in process. Error prevention notwithstanding, it really should be easier.

Thanks for your reply. I’ll keep playing with BrightKite.

Thanks for your feedback. You are making some valid points, and I’d like to address them here:

- We don’t allow free-form checkins like Dodgeball and Plazes because we don’t draw from a database of places. @ checkins are actually geocoded, which means that our service should work for any address that works in Google Maps.

- Dodgeball lets you check in at businesses that they have in their database. If it’s not in the DB, you’re out of luck, not to speak of other countries.

- Plazes checks their database for a match, and if they don’t find one, you have to manually create the place, entering all of the info yourself. We think that’s a pretty bad user experience. On top of that, many places have more than one standardized name.

- We have 2 types of checkins: address (using @), and business (using ?). When you do a ? search, we base that search on your last check-in. That means if you were checked in at 555 West St, San Francisco, and you do ?Starbucks, we will list the closest matches for Starbucks around that location. This has worked extremely well so far. We are about to introduce a ?Starbucks @666 East St, San Francisco, or ?Starbucks in Chicago feature, too.

- The “are you sure” confirmation only appears when you are attempting to check in somewhere that’s more than 30 miles away from your last check-in. This is to prevent errors, and was a much requested feature.

- The whole point of Brightkite is to meet people around places, ad-hoc, in real time. That means that we actually have to be able to pinpoint you on a map based on your check-in. Plazes doesn’t need to, as its primary function is to “log” your places. Different use cases.

All that being said, there are of course a lot of ways to improve our service, and we’re working on it (we’ve been in private beta for 2 weeks). We appreciate any feedback you might have.

Thanks,
Martin
brightkite.com