BlockChalk Blog

Use BlockChalk at SXSW, win an iPad

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:22:07 -0800

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: this year’s South By Southwest festival is all about location, location, location.

Every location-based startup you can think of will be there. Parties will be sponsored. Stickers will be stuck. Checkins will be tweeted. Geo-ponies will be rainbow-ified.

Being a location-based service ourselves, we’re not about to be left out of the fun. But just like BlockChalk is a little bit different from the rest, our approach to SXSW will be a bit different, too.

So here’s the deal:

BOOM. That’s right. No stickers or wristbands or breath mints or other junk you’ll toss in your drawer and never see again. Just use BlockChalk at SXSW and you could win a shiny new iPad. This is one contest prize you’ll savor. Just don’t drop it while you’re trying to type on it, ok?

So how can you win?

It’s simple: just use BlockChalk to comment on the parties, panels, and gigs you experience. We’ve even added some special category buttons just for SXSW to make it even easier. You’ll see these automatically if you’re in Austin and using our latest iPhone app, Palm webOS app, or our HTML5 app on Android and iPhone.

The authors of the 10 most humorous, insightful, or useful chalks will each win a sweet BlockChalk t-shirt. The writer of the best overall chalk will win that glorious iPad.

Winners will be notified after midnight March 22nd (that is, early that morning). Just check your “Replies” tab in BlockChalk — if there’s a message there from us, it means you’ve won!

And one more thing.

We’ll be at the “GeoBash” party being held by our friends at SimpleGeo on Sunday 3/14, so swing on by and say hello!

Borrow, buy, sell, trade, report, praise, complain, connect and more...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:34:00 -0800

Over the last several weeks we’ve watched people all over the world post to BlockChalk for all sorts of reasons. Neighbors are using BlockChalk to borrow, buy, sell, trade, report, praise, complain, connect and more. As we keep building BlockChalk to be the world’s neighborhood bulletin board we want to make sure posting remains dead simple and super fast.

With that goal in mind we’re introducing chalk categories. We’re testing them out first on our HTML5 webapp and they’ll be available on our native iPhone and Palm apps very soon.

We’ll be adding more functionality to each individual category in the coming weeks but for now we’d love to know what categories might be missing. What do you want to post to your neighborhood? Let us know and we’ll find a way to incorporate it into future releases.

Send your feedback through Twitter, Facebook, Email or leave a comment below. Thanks for building BlockChalk where you live!

A Little More Conversation

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:46:00 -0800

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

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:53:39 -0800

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

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:48:29 -0800

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

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:40:19 -0800

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...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:41:00 -0800

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!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:47:00 -0800

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

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:29:00 -0800

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

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:11:55 -0800

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.

Home Neighborhood: You can now stake a claim to your home neighborhood. We all have a certain pride in where we live and call home. Set your home neighborhood in Blockchalk and keep track of what’s happening where you live. Chalkback to your neighbors or send them a private reply. See a chalk that you don’t want hanging around your ‘hood? Use the “Bury” feature and help make it disappear.

Push Notifications: Stay updated on what’s happening in BlockChalk. You can set the new BlockChalk app to remind you with a push notification when someone chalks in your home neighborhood, chalks you back or replies privately.

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

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:56:16 -0800

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...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:02:00 -0800

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

Living in the bubble (or, why the future of location is even bigger than you think)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:08:00 -0800

Last Friday I attended TechCrunch’s excellent Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. Real time web services are all the rage these days of course, and this conference brought together entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and others to discuss the field and debate where it’s going.

Much of the focus was on location-based services and information “streams”. Since this is the area in which BlockChalk plays, the discussion was of personal interest to me. Companies like Twitter and Foursquare were in the spotlight, although newcomers like SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, and HotPotato attracted their share of well-deserved attention. Great products, smart people.

As I listened I heard some exciting predictions for the future: how one day soon we would all know where everyone is all the time; that people everywhere would share such information willingly and benefit from it greatly; and how this would fundamentally alter the way we interact as a society.

But something about all this didn’t feel quite right. There seemed to be an underlying assumption at play: that today’s location-based services show us the shape of things to come. And so it was that about halfway through the day I finally realized what was bothering me.

credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr

Everyone in the room was living in the geo bubble.

What’s the geo bubble? It’s a land populated by the early adopters of today’s location-based services. Inside the bubble, people’s online actions are primarily driven by social activity and personal reputation. This has many implications, but the one I want to address here is privacy: bubble-dwellers have a reduced expectation of it, because it gets in the way of the things they want to do.

Now, the bubble is a great place to live, and bubble-dwellers are perfectly nice folks. It’s not my intent to besmirch them (hell, I frequently visit the bubble myself). Instead, my intent is to point out that, by definition, there is a world outside the bubble. That’s where most people live, and yet as an industry we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done there.

Today’s hottest services are pitched directly at bubble-dwellers, and by all accounts they are popular, useful, and fun. But by linking your identity to your location and sharing this information broadly, many of these services largely ignore issues of personal privacy and security. As a result, there are a wide range of everyday social interactions and transactions to which they are ill suited — buying and selling goods and services, lodging anonymous complaints, reporting crimes, the list goes on. It also means that a large portion of the population may never feel comfortable using them.

Dave and I created BlockChalk in part because we believe that the world outside the bubble is every bit as interesting as (and larger than) the world inside. Bubble-based apps will undoubtedly continue to grow dramatically, and the bubble itself will grow as early adopter behavior trickles down to a broader audience. But in order for location-based services to truly reach the mainstream, we as product designers will need to get even smarter about the social assumptions that we are harnessing — or in some cases, undermining.

For BlockChalk, that means a focus on personal privacy. We’re building it from the ground up to be a location-based service for everyone, where the user is always in control of how much identity and location information they share. We’ve also made it aggressively hyper-local, with a strong focus on what’s going on in your neighborhood. We think this will encourage people to use BlockChalk for completely different purposes than systems like Twitter and Foursquare. We also think it will attract entirely new types of users to this space. And we’re already seeing both happening.

The world of location-based services is moving faster than ever, and the hottest products out there today are innovative and fun to use. But it would be a mistake for us to assume that today’s users are representative of the overall population, and that today’s products necessarily represent the shape of things to come.

The future is going to be different — and even bigger — than we expect.

Stephen Hood

Now available in the Palm app store

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:32:21 -0800

We’re happy to announce that BlockChalk is now available for the Palm Pre and Pixi, via Palm’s official app store. This is a native webOS application that gives you full access to BlockChalk with a slick interface that makes the most of your Palm phone. Best of all, it’s free!

To get BlockChalk on your Pre or Pixi, just visit the Palm app store and search for “blockchalk”.

We’d like to thank Les Orchard, independent developer extraordinaire and author of this app. Les used our open API to build a great experience for Palm users. We love it and we think you will too.

Now get out there and chalk up your neighborhood!

Home sweet home

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:02:00 -0800

BlockChalk now makes it easier than ever to keep track of what’s going on in your neighborhood. You can now set a “home neighborhood” and jump to it any time, from anywhere. You can set your home neighborhood to be the spot where you’re standing right now. Or, if you’re somewhere else, simply hit “browse elsewhere”, key in the address you want, and tap “set as home neighborhood”.

After you’ve set your home neighborhood, you can always jump back to it by tapping the “home” button.

Home neighborhoods are available right now via the BlockChalk web app (http://blockchalk.com) on iPhone and Android, and are coming soon to the Palm Pre. We’re also working on native applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, and other popular smartphones, so stay tuned!

Updated BlockChalk.com

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:10:56 -0800

We just updated the design of BlockChalk.com! While we’ll miss our clever black-on-white, chalk-on-chalkboard look, it was time to move on. Our new site is a little easier on the eyes and a lot more functional.

Take a look and let us know what else you’d like to see on BlockChalk.com!

Chalk to me

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:27:13 -0700

As you may be aware, BlockChalk lets you “reply” to other people’s chalks. Replies enable you to carry on private conversations with other BlockChalk users, even though there’s no registration or sign-in. It’s really useful for things like making contact with a seller and taking a transaction offline. Of course there are many other uses, and since BlockChalk launched we’ve noticed that people are replying quite a lot — almost 1/5 of all the posts to date are BlockChalk are private replies.

We’ve heard from a number of people that they like private replies but would also like an easier way to reply publicly to someone else’s chalk. So today we’ve introduced a new feature called chalkback. Now when you’re reading a chalk, you can tap “chalkback” to post a public response. Everyone in the area will see your chalkback, along with a link to the original chalk you referenced.

Chalkbacks are available for use right now on your iPhone and Android phone, and will be coming to the Palm Pre application soon. Check it out and let us know what you think.

—Stephen and Dave

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:59:00 -0700

We’ve just improved BlockChalk in a way that we think you’ll find really useful. Put simply, BlockChalk now knows neighborhoods the same way you do: by name.

This means that when you post a new chalk we mark it with the name of the neighborhood you’re standing in. When other people see your chalk, they’ll see the neighborhood name, too. In many cases we can now also tell you your neighborhood name while you’re simply browsing nearby chalks.

These changes help us to expand on the idea of “neighborhood” in BlockChalk. Instead of just showing you chalks within a certain distance of your location, we can now also show you chalks from the entire neighborhood. Say you’re standing on the edge of the Mission Dolores neighborhood in San Francisco. Before today you wouldn’t see all the chalks in Mission Dolores, just the ones nearest to you. Now, you’ll see it all!

But what if you’re not using a mobile device? Or what if you’re curious about a city or neighborhood but you’re not actually there? The BlockChalk web site now lists the most active cities internationally. Just click on one to see the latest chalks in the city. For most cities you can also filter by neighborhood; the most active ones are listed for each city. For example, you can browse the latest chalks in San Francisco, or you can zoom in to see what’s going on in hot neighborhoods like Cole Valley.

There are already over 1550 neighborhoods in BlockChalk, representing chalks posted in more than 1100 cities around the world! We expect these numbers to rise as BlockChalk grows, so if you don’t yet see any neighborhoods in your area you probably will soon.

We hope you enjoy these changes and find them useful. Please let us know what you think, and keep chalking your block.

—Stephen and Dave

There's chalk everywhere! (also, Android and Palm Pre support)

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:32:01 -0700

It’s been almost three weeks since we introduced BlockChalk and since then we’ve seen new chalk showing up all over the world. From Helsinki to Hawaii, Calgary to Canberra, the growth has far surpassed our expectations. BlockChalk is now being used on 5 continents, 42 countries, over 120 cities and more than 250 neighborhoods.

We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback, but a common request has been to provide support for other phones than just the iPhone. Happily, we can now announce that we’ve extended our browser support to include Google Android-based phones (specifically those running the latest v1.5 of Android). Thanks to the HTML5 support provided by the iPhone and Android, you’re able to use BlockChalk right inside your phone’s browser, with nothing to download or install. Simply go to the site and start chalking.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can now also use BlockChalk on the Palm Pre, thanks to a new application released this weekend by developer extraordinaire Les Orchard. It’s free and works great! Les’ app is one of the first to use our new API. You can expect more native apps to follow, for a variety of platforms.

Thanks again to all of you who have checked out BlockChalk so far. Keep chalking, and keep letting us know what you think.

Stephen and Dave

A new (and different) geo platform

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:17:15 -0700

We’ve just released a brand new API for BlockChalk. It’s very easy to learn and use: requests are made via HTTP GET and POST, and data is provided in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.

These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services.

You can read the full API documentation here: BlockChalk API v0.6

So what does this mean? It means that BlockChalk is now more than just a nifty GPS app for your iPhone. It’s an open platform for storing and accessing user-generated content within a geographic context.

What makes the BlockChalk platform unique?

It’s dead simple. There are no badges, medals, points, unicorns, pirates, or other viral gaming craziness. BlockChalk is about locations and the messages people leave there, that’s it.

It’s flexible. The interfaces and data structures are general in nature, and we encourage you to build application-specific functionality on top of them. We’ve thought up plenty of uses for BlockChalk, but we think it’s the independent developers who will come up with the best ones.
It’s anonymous. This means authentication is unnecessary and security concerns are light (when was the last time you heard that?). The API just uses a simple user ID token to tie together a given user’s chalks (i.e. messages they’ve posted) and replies. Anonymity also means that BlockChalk is unconcerned with identity, friends, and social networks. Think more Craigslist, less Facebook. Tired of the ego-driven status-update rat race? BlockChalk is for you.

This is our first major release of the BlockChalk API (v0.6) so we welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

Finally, we’d like to recognize Joshua Schachter, Toby Eilliott, Les Orchard, and Joao Prado Maia for their invaluable input in the design of this API. Thanks guys!

Stephen Hood

BlockChalk