

FB is the only social service not dropping the ball on users' current location - pjsullivan3
http://blog.tripl.com/post/31464291529

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jemka
>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.

~~~
bluetidepro
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".

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

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stbullard
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.

~~~
pjsullivan3
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.

