Comments on: Location Sharing Options

By: Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:25:35 +0000

Folks, I said what I did about Brightkite because I honestly found the user experience frustrating enough that I didn’t want to use it anymore. People were asking why they’d use Shizzow over Brightkite, and I wanted to answer that, from my own perspective.

Yes, Shizzow being a local company is an advantage in that I can talk to the developers in person if I have questions or need help. But that doesn’t stop me from giving their service the same level of criticism if something isn’t working, and you will see that here or on Twitter or their Get Satisfaction page.

Whether an application works for me has to do with a number of factors beyond the feature list. Like Twitter and its competitors, location sharing is an area with a number of very similar options from the features perspective. Many of us have tried several services and only kept on with one or two of them. I felt it was worth discussing why that might be the case.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:01:17 +0000

I have to concur with Jeff the Great. This post lacks facts and is slanted towards Shizzow (created by friends of yours by any chance?).
Especially the Brightkite review is highly inaccurate.

By: Jeff the Great

Jeff the Great — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:14:17 +0000

Wow, your views are incredibly bias and filled with very few facts (though you appear to present them as facts).

You say Brightkite sucks? Wow, great statement…very professional.

BrightKite and Shizzow are what users make of them. You may only see the city someone is in on brightkite, but that is because thats the only info the user entered.

As far as I can tell (as a brightkite user), the shizzow features you mention are not unique to Shizzow…they are all present in BrightKite.

Take a look at the business listings in Brightkite vs Shizzow…looks like they are accessing the SAME data.

Hey, as a Portlander, I hope Shizzow succeeds. Just be careful not to be blinded from reality. You sound like the sportscaster that is a total ‘homer’ and is unrealistic about his team.

By: Get Back Together With Ex

Get Back Together With Ex — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:10:48 +0000

Theres so many cool things about this. Some day everyone is going to be linked by social networking programs and no one will talk anymore in real life

By: Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for August 15 » Silicon Florist

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for August 15 » Silicon Florist — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:12:09 +0000

[...] Location Sharing Options (The response to the “What makes Shizzow unique?” post above) [...]

By: Pascal

Pascal — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:46:32 +0000

There is another service, pbxes.org that allows location sharing. A client needs to be installed on the mobile from http://pbxes.org/m to localize by cell towers.

By: Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:03:29 +0000

Tray, that’s great that Brightkite is working well for you. I tried it for a while last spring, and found that lots of little problems made it hard to use, and not a helpful addition to my life. That’s why I’m glad that people are continuing to offer new location-based services, so I can find things that work well for me, and the social groups I’m a part of.

By: Tray

Tray — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:50:42 +0000

I am an avid FE, Twitter and Brightkite user. Its hard to take your comparison seriously when many of your facts about the services outside of Shizzow quite incorrect. For example why even bring this up when it was updated long ago:
http://brightkite.com/account/not_logged_in . If anything it shows Bkite listens to their community and addresses the problems. I could list many more but why waste the time? People see thru un-benevolent posts such as this.

By: Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:59:09 +0000

The problem with location on Twitter is that it's mostly using a single text field with no consensus on format. Some services want a city name, some want lat/long. And some, like Twittervision, are looking for the info in your posts. So there's a lot of extra glue required to make this useful. We'll do better with a location service that keeps full geographic info pushing relevant updates to Twitter, not the other way around. ETA: A Get Satisfaction style Twitter feed import to a location tracker might be cool, though. Users would grab relevant tweets and geotag them, marking that that's what they're doing here. I could see that being a useful feature.

By: Lennon

Lennon — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:33:43 +0000

I’d love to try out Shizzow, but they really, really need to get out of private beta mode — a social location service that I can’t use (much less direct my friends to) is worse than useless, it’s maddening.

I was perhaps one of ten people in the Portland area to try to use Dodgeball, and it definitely worked well enough, but never hit critical mass. That being said, if the Twitter API is allowing geocoding now, I expect they’ll win this particular round, if only by virtue of the sheer user count. (Of course, without an iPhone, I suspect I’ll be left out in the no-geo weeds, but them’s the breaks.)