A Little More Conversation
BlockChalk keeps growing in cities, towns and neighborhoods all over the world. We love seeing all this new use but it’s starting to make it difficult to keep track of nearby neighborhood conversations. Today we’re introducing a better way to follow the conversations where you live.
Point your iPhone or Android browser to http://blockchalk.com and take a look. Our mobile webapp now aggregates all comments with their original chalk. On the Nearby and Home views a small counter hints at the activity below. Drill-down to see the comments and their associated locations all in one place.
This new view is only available on our nifty HTML5 mobile webpp. We release new features here first since we can respond to feedback, thoughts and ideas from our global crew of dedicated chalkers and iterate at ludicrous speed. If you ever want to see a sneak preview of what’s next for BlockChalk just take a look at our webapp!
Let us know what you think about this new release. With your help, we’ll be rolling them out to our native apps soon. Send your feedback through Twitter, Facebook, Email or leave a comment below. Thanks for helping us build BlockChalk where you live!
Introducing Myself To The Neighborhood
Hello Chalkers, Josh here, the new guy!
It’s great to be speaking directly to you for the first time. I’m a big fan of being personal and up-front with our users and hope you will all get to know me well moving forward. And I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Stephen and Dave, two very trusted and talented allies.
As the technical co-founder on the team, I’m all about making this rig run. Sure, that’s going to include not-so-glamorous things like scaling, uptime, security, and abuse mitigation. But it also includes the really interesting stuff of building-out new products: fast and slick feature development, wide platform support, third party developer tools, and last but not least, listening closely to you - our rock star users - for what’s working and what’s not.
I come to BlockChalk from past gigs at Craigslist and Delicious, services to which I feel deeply honored to have been able to contribute. My experiences there will certainly inform my work here, but I’m also really looking forward to the new, uncharted technical and product innovation challenges BlockChalk brings to bear. And in many ways, we’re all going to be exploring that together. It’s gonna be a great 2010.
Cheers,
Josh
Craigslist Alum Josh Whiting Joins BlockChalk
Today is a huge day for the BlockChalk team. We’re proud to announce that Josh Whiting has joined us as chief engineer and co-founder.
Josh comes to us from Craigslist, a company we greatly respect and which has been the source of much inspiration. Prior to Craigslist, Josh and Stephen worked together at del.icio.us, where Josh was lead engineer and played a key role in many of the innovative features and trends that we pioneered there.
Josh brings to BlockChalk a whole new level of engineering capability, as well as battle-tested experience in building and scaling two of the world’s most successful consumer web products. So watch closely, because we’re about to kick it up a notch. Bam, etc.
Welcome to the team, Josh!
Chalking up the Twittersphere
Now that Twitter has a geo-enabled API, we think there are a number of interesting ways that BlockChalk can interact with the Twittersphere to everyone’s benefit.
We’ve just started our first experiment, which is to collect chalks from two U.S. metropolitan areas (New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area) and then send them to Twitter in real time. In addition to geographic coordinates, these tweets include hashtags representing the neighborhood and city where the chalk was written, and a link enabling you to read the entire message over at BlockChalk.
You can find these tweets at @BC_BayArea and @BC_NewYorkCity, with more cities coming soon. And since they’re geotagged in Twitter, you’ll also see these tweets when you use your favorite geo-enabled Twitter client in these two areas!
BlockChalk in the News...
Since we launched our native iPhone app a little over a week ago BlockChalk has been getting some great media coverage and some fantastic reviews. Huge thanks to the writers and bloggers for taking the time to explore BlockChalk! Check out a few highlights below:
The Next Challenges for Mobile phones: Find Me and Tell Me Who I Am
Use BlockChalk, FourSquare and Google’s Near Me Now to “…leave location-based messages at the end of your road or in a cafe, as kind of green graffiti that doesn’t despoil the streets.”
BlockChalk: A Free Location-based Bulletin Board for iPhone/Palm Pre/Android
“…. BlockChalk acts a lot more like a community message board for the 21st century.”
BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device
“BlockChalk works because they keep it simple.”
BlockChalk Lets You Leave Geo-tagged Notes for the Neighborhood
“Fostering a sense of local community in the age of the Internet and globalization is no easy task.”…BlockChalk is trying to do just that.
BlockChalk: An Anonymous Message Board for Your Neighborhood
BlockChalk “wants to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody’s privacy.” “The design is simple, to the point and doesn’t get in the way of the product’s features.”
Have You Heard of BlockChalk?
BlockChalk works great w/ hyperlocal blogging. Use it to connect with potential neighborhood readers, find blogworthy content in chalks, and promote your blog posts with a new chalk in your neighborhood.
BlockChalk Introduces Super Simple Location Based Annotation of Real World
“You’re stuck in a stall with a clever response to that scribble on the wall, only problem, you’re a Sharpie short. With BlockChalk, mobile users can now annotate the real world through a digital space.”
Blockchalk Offers Location-based Commenting
“There’s something new in the social stream worth checking out: Blockchalk. “
BlockChalk arrives in the App Store!
Hey, guess what? BlockChalk for iPhone is now available in the App Store!
For those of you who are new to BlockChalk, we’re a location-based messaging service for your neighborhood. You can leave messages (“chalks”) on your block, your street, at the coffee shop, or anywhere you happen to be. Other BlockChalk users nearby can reply to you publicly or privately.
People are already chalking for all sorts of reasons: to share honest opinions and observations about their neighborhood, to praise or gripe about local businesses, to borrow and trade with their neighbors, to complain about city services, and much more. And people are using BlockChalk all over the world, with activity in over 90 countries, 6600 cities, and 10,000 neighborhoods!
Our new iPhone app lets you set your “home neighborhood” so you can keep up-to-date with the latest chalks near home. It also adds support for Apple’s push notifications. This means you can now be notified when there are new chalks in your home neighborhood or when someone replies to something you’ve written.
And don’t forget you can also use BlockChalk on Android and iPhone simply by pointing your phone’s browser to http://blockchalk.com. There’s also an excellent app for the Palm Pre and Pixi.
Now get out there and chalk up your neighborhood!
Stephen and Dave
City Neighborhood Posters by Ork
Where we live is a large part of our identity. We take great pride in our hometown or neighborhood because it often reflects some aspect of who we are and how we see ourselves. At the same time, the spirit of a neighborhood or city comes directly from its residents. BlockChalk helps us celebrate our pride in place and we’re always looking for products that do the same.
These posters by Ork offer a unique way to celebrate cities and neighborhoods with an elegant combination of typography and cartography. Each poster represents a different city and all of its neighborhoods. The names of the neighborhoods define the boundaries and create the more familiar city shape.
The complete series is available online: http://www.orkposters.com. They make a great gift for any of the city dwellers in your life. I own the Seattle poster and have given a couple of the Boston versions to my Beantown family and friends.
After you’ve found your neighborhood on one of the posters, go find it in BlockChalk! Set it as your Home-Sweet-Home and start giving your home ‘hood its voice.
Bonus Trivia Question: Which neighborhood is missing in the San Francisco poster? It’s a gem and a popular location on BlockChalk.
-Dave
Coming to an iPhone near you
At BlockChalk HQ we’re working feverishly to get BlockChalk into as many neighborhoods as possible. This week we took a big step towards that goal and submitted our native iPhone app to Apple. We expect it to be available in the App Store soon.
BlockChalk on the iPhone is still super easy to use, but for your chalking pleasure we’ve added a couple of new features that make it even easier to chat with your neighbors.
We hope you like the new app and can’t wait to have you join the conversation where you live. As always, let us know what you think.
Behold our shiny new mobile web app
We’ve just launched a completely redesigned mobile experience for BlockChalk. Just visit http://blockchalk.com with the browser on your iPhone or Android phone to witness the new hotness. Through the magic of HTML5 we deliver the full BlockChalk experience entirely inside the browser and with nothing to download or install. This includes:
- Using GPS to post messages anywhere in the world and see what people are saying near you
- Setting your “home neighborhood” and interacting with your neighbors, even when you’re not there
- Using the new “Replies” tab to track when people reply to you, so you can keep the conversation going no matter where you are
Because web-based applications are so much faster to develop and deploy, it’s always been the plan to use ours as a “proving ground” for new features and designs that will eventually make their way into our native applications. That’s how BlockChalk originally started, and that’s how we plan to keep rocking it.
You can expect to see similar looks and functionality in our upcoming iPhone app (which we expect to be available soon) and the already-available Palm Pre app, with native apps to follow for other major smartphone platforms. Check out the new web app and start chalking up your block!
The Reviews Are In...
BlockChalk has been in the Palm App Store for over a week now and the chalk keeps appearing in cities all over the world. The app is lucky to have some great reviews from the people that matter the most: the folks actually using it in their neighborhood.
The app has received some great praise and lots of helpful suggestions for future releases. It’s currently rated between 4 and 5 stars in the store. Thanks to all the BlockChalkers for letting us know what you think! Keep the feedback coming and keep chalkin’ up your block!
The Palm App Store isn’t currently accessible from a desktop or laptop. You have to have a Palm device to check it out (we hear this is changing shortly). In the meantime, we collected a few of the reviews and included them below.
PS - Thanks to the rock stars at Palm for getting BlockChalk through the app approval process! Really appreciate all your help and support.
5 STARS ***** Awesome app, very responsive no lag like lots of other apps out there. And! No sign up! Couldn’t ask for something better. Update: I sold 3 effect guitar pedals to some dude i linked from blockchalk. Good stuff
4 STARS **** Honestly think it needs to be a multi-OS app if it isn’t already. Smart phone dumb phone compatibility would make this great, Maybe even an main page like twitter n facebook 2 use on the pac at home. Five star app potential. I give it 4 3/4 stars.
5 STARS ***** This is a very impressive little app. So much potential once it starts getting lots of other folks on board. Can’t wait until my neighborhood is full of chalk.
4 STARS **** Really cool app, would give it five stars but I haven’t realized the full potential of it yet. So far there are only two other people who have chalked in my area and I live in a decent size city. Hope more people get on the band wagon and start using this app.
5 STARS ***** It’s gonna be great when more people get it downloaded. Come on people join and and start chalkin it up. It’s pretty sweet
5 STARS ***** Pretty awesome, you can talk with neighbors you don’t even know and find out about some cool stuff happening around you.
4 STARS **** It’s handy for public/local issues, events, achievements, solutions or general comments. I don’t think it was intended for personal networking (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)
4 STARS **** Very useful when situation permits. Also could be used as a “neighborhood watch” or anything that would benefit your block.
4 STARS **** I think this could revolutionize the way we do things and communicate. This wold be great for auctions to screw the auctioneer. this rawks.
4 STARS **** This is a cool app! I wold give it 5* if i was able to chalk @ areas outside of mine.
4 STARS **** Very interesting idea. Can see some fun with this one. Threading of replies would be good.
5 STARS **** I really like this a lot. Needs more people but that comes with time. Great app!
5 STARS ***** Very cool. Needs more people but they will come. It is awesome in larger cities
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