Ask HN: Rate My Startup - TweetMapr | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate My Startup - TweetMapr

tweetmapr.com

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TweetMapr lets you easily share you location on Twitter. It's like the Twitpic model for location.

A friend and I have built this site over the last couple weeks and we have a list of planned features a mile long. I feel like we've gotten the basic stuff right and I would love to get some feedback from all of you.

We're going to support the new location info from Twitter, obviously, and allow users to post their location through a hashtag from any twitter interface. We're also working on an API for 3rd parties so if anyone is interested in integrating with us send me an email and we can start talking. bpollet at gmail.

I'd appreciate any feedback, Thanks.

How will you deal with the various possibilities for abuse this kind of functionality offers ? (stalking etc).

We have a couple ideas. First is that you only post your location when you want to. We're not going to map every tweet you post on twitter. So a user would only post from our site, or include the hashtag, when they want to be placed on a map.

If that isn't enough for people we are open to including privacy controls, like only allowing people you follow to view your location, but we wanted to see what people wanted from the site before we went down that road.

Ok. If I might make a suggestion: delay the location data by a random amount, the random amount should be user configurable for different locations (minimum+variation).

I've been thinking about this particular problem for quite a while because of an idea we had about two years ago called 'lifeyarn', the plan was to couple mobile pictures with date, time and locationstamps into a threaded representation of your life. You can then use the threads to meet people and do all kinds of interesting things with them (who was where on what day, who attended that dinner and so on).

The possibilities for abuse are endless, you really have to be careful with that and pro-active, don't wait until a bad thing happens and then plug the hole.

Thanks for the tip!

I'm definitely interested in how best to solve the privacy problem. I'm not really interested in the majority of location services because they tend to track you all the time, my thought was that making it more of a on demand thing would help to alleviate the fears but it may not be enough.

When I signed in I got:

"We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

I'll take a look at it, thanks. [Update] It looks to be working now, I think our host was having some problems. Please give it another try.

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