{"id":622,"date":"2009-03-08T11:28:16","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T19:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=622"},"modified":"2009-03-08T11:28:16","modified_gmt":"2009-03-08T19:28:16","slug":"brightkite-for-dodgeball-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/08\/brightkite-for-dodgeball-users\/","title":{"rendered":"BrightKite for Dodgeball users"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that Dodgeball<\/a> is gone, here’s a short guide on how you can replicate the Dodgeball experience in BrightKite<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Friendship<\/h4>\n

The notion of friendship is more complicated than Dodgeball’s. First, in order for people to see your exact location, you’ll need to make them a trusted friend<\/a>. Also, how you receive their checkins and posts is configurable on a friend-by-friend basis<\/strong>. If you want to receive all checkins from all friends via SMS, you’ll need to choose “Edit Friendship” for each user and set that. So, in short:<\/p>\n

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  1. Make each of your friends “trusted”<\/li>\n
  2. Choose to receive their posts and checkins via SMS<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Strangers<\/h4>\n

    There are a bunch of features that deal with meeting new people, and being alerted when other BrightKite users are in your vicinity. This is configurable under Account Settings -> Notifications -> Nearby Notifications<\/strong>. You can theoretically use this single area to control notifications from all of your friends, but because it’s location-centric (“only let me know when people check in within x kilometers from me”) the only way to replicate Dodgeball’s behavior is to configure your friends on a user-by-user basis, above. So, that’s how I do it.<\/p>\n

    SMS<\/h4>\n

    They have very similar SMS commands<\/a> to Dodgeball, including the @<\/strong> notation for checking in and !<\/strong> notation for posts (nearest equivalent to the Dodgeball “shout out”).<\/p>\n

    Locations<\/h4>\n

    The way they do locations (ex. @viceroy) is similar to how Dodgeball did it in the old days<\/em> – that is, they validate that they know the location you’re requesting in a database before allowing the checkin. You can create custom-named places (called “placemarks”) like this: search on their site for the thing you want to check in to, by address (ex. “1501 Pike Pl Seattle, WA 98101”) on the resulting page you’ll be able to add that address as a Placemark and give it a friendly name (ex. “Pike Place Market”). When you’re out somewhere you can also type “MARK friendlyname” to create a placemark for your current location. I think those methods only create a placemark for you<\/strong> but they have a hack for creating public placemarks<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

    Cool New Features<\/h4>\n

    It had a few things dodgeball didn’t…<\/p>\n