FB is the only social service not dropping the ball on users' current location | Hacker News Reader

FB is the only social service not dropping the ball on users' current location

blog.tripl.com

6 pointspjsullivan36 comments

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>This post was written by Tripl’s CEO Peter Sullivan

That sets a certain expectation in my mind for what I'm about to read.

>we are location 'whores'

Interesting word choice

>First the first time ever

Simple mistake

>Users’ current location is a great way to gather proper metrics, segment advertisement, and A/B test on different regions, however most of these services aren’t connecting the user’s location to an object or indexing it with structure.

Run-on

>Its something

Should be It's

...

I'm done.

I'm glad I saw this comment on here. I was thinking the same thing. Why did they make it over obvious (at the beginning of the article) that the author was the CEO? Why not just a simple tagline at the end or put that whole block of text at the end of the article. By making it such a big deal at the beginning, like they did, I did exactly what you did. I scrutinized the article much more, naturally, because I figure it had more importance since it was such a big deal that it was "written by the CEO".

Sounds like a CEO who needs to be reminded that he's also the janitor.

Sorry about some grammar mistakes :/

Assuming the author/OP isn't trolling, I think he's confusing "current city", "hometown", "location" and other such fields with the user's actual current location.

The first three, when implemented as free text fields, are rarely updated by users, and meant to represent where someone is from or where their home is now. As free text fields, they allow for some degree of personal expression. They're not designed for API consumers, they're designed for users. This doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't mean these platforms are dropping the ball: it means these platforms have made a design decision that the OP finds inconvenient. Even if these were implemented as parseable geotags, they are so rarely updated by users that calling them "current" is in most cases misleading.

Actual current location information is given in Foursquare's checkins, Twitter's tweets, and Google+'s posts - just like it is in Facebook's status updates. AFAIK, all of these use parseable geotags.

If I were an investor in Tripl (Roland Zeller?), I would worry about a CEO with such a poor understanding of API semantics and the platforms underlying his company.

No I use the term "current location" as Facebook labels it. You are correct in saying that other platforms call this differently but they are all asking the same general question. "Where do you normally live now". I think you are incorrect in the sense that this shouldn't be a supported part of the API. If your platform is based on Geo (Like Foursquare) then you can of course utilize additional checkins to help solidify the concept of a users "current location" but I still think its really important to index properly. These design decisions that you talk about were implemented before they were supporting geo tags in the API. I think its an easy design change to support this methodology. The platform, the users, and the developers would all gain.

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