location-based data

location-sharing networks

Dodgeball

• awareness of same user venue check-in's within timeframe
  • When you check-in at a venue other people have recently checked in to, your confirmation notification will say "2 other Dodgeball users are also here!", so you know to look around for people in your community. The only disappointment to this feature is not knowing how long (maybe 3 hours?) it keeps users checked in somewhere, so it's not entirely accurate.
• city-exclusive notifications
  • Automation by the service to know where you and your friends are and only give updates from your friends when they're in the same city as you.
    • This is one of the single-most important aspects of Dodgeball that BrightKite totally failed at by not launching with this feature. In BK, let's say you add 10 friends and 1 of those friends travels from San Francisco to Florida, and starts checking in at all the coffee shops in Florida. You could care less where your friend is in Florida - there's no actionable item to run into them, so you have to manually go in and turn notifications on or off for the friend based on your tracking of where they are when - or just get annoyed by their check-ins.
• city switching
  • Allowing a user to manually switch which city they're in. In Dodgeball, it would be the short code of "switch SF" or "switch Austin" to change the city in which you receive notifications for. While it *could* make sense to do this automatically, the manual ability is nice if you're only out of town for a couple days and want to keep track with where your friends are going at home still.
• conservative interaction UI
  • This is less specific, but just an observation of behavior on Dodgeball. Something in the UI encourages more conservative friending behavior. The fact that you must have a mutual connection with someone to share any data either direction tries to tell users that they should only request friendship with people they really trust. This was the opposite of my experience on BrightKite, where I got a frenzy of friend requests from people I didn't know - using it similar to how you would use Twitter - a public free-for-all of friending.
• crushes
  • The ability to add a crush. When you add "User A" as a crush, it notifies User A that someone has a crush on them, but won't tell them who. It is not until you are in the same vicinity as User A, that User A will receive a message telling them who had a crush on them and urge them to go say hello.
    • the email you receive when someone adds you as a crush
    • I think this is a cute feature to have even if it receives low usage. It gives the service a personality and the community a guide for the type of tone of interaction.
• private venues
  • The ability to create private venues and only have the address given to friends of the private venue creator when people check in.
• shouts
  • A great feature for last-minute event organizing or warning friends about events.
    • Example 1: "Who's up for brunch in an hour in XYZ neighborhood?"
    • Example 2: "FYI, the XYZ concert tonight is charging $20 at the door instead of $10!"
• user-generated venues/database
  • Another favorite feature. There is a greater sense of a community when you know that the venues to check-in on Dodgeball were created by the users. No automated databases asserting a venue is known as one name when perhaps locally it's known as another. Also the ability for users to create short codes for venues (e.g. checking in "@Coffee To The People" can also be "@CTTP" for short based on user-generated venue data. It's also interesting to continuously learn if you're the first person in your community to discover a new place.

Fire Eagle

• privacy
  • Granular privacy which shows respect for different comfort levels of users based on exact location, neighborhood, city, etc.

location-sharing behavior

Topics to break out:

• couples checking in
• expectations (or lack?)
• friending protocols
• private venues

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