Someone mentioned earlier, about climbing a mountain and creating a wall at the peak- 1000m or yards away? No way!! Id want someone to have to be much closer to be able to share/contribute to the wall.

Live somewhere remote? Why do you need to set up a 1000 radius wall, for some vast swath of land? Do you need to set wall for the whole cornfield, or the house at one corner? Do I need to set a wall for a whole hillside or ski area, or the peak or a special cliff?

My point is, setting a smaller radius, keeps the special feeling of discovery. And if you are in a remote area, it just increases the reward for you upon travelling and finding new walls, OR, seeing a post on your own little special wall.

Coming hypocritically from an EDGE user. -I say 100 or 10 yards/meters, but no less. I think 10m is “pinpoint” enough

I think the radius option when creating a wall would be the best, but within reason. Setting a radius of 2 meters in NYC would make your wall nearly impossible to see by chance.

But then, creating a wall for an entire city (or neighborhood) would be possible - kind of like a “local” infinity wall, such as a Harlem or SoHo wall, in NYC.

I will admit that I do live in New York City, and to be more specific, midtown Manhattan. Things here are small, on a given city block there can be 10 stores side by side from each other if not more, all of which have a store width of about 20 feet and sometimes less. Doing the math, 1 city block is about 80 meters. So I’m sure anyone can imagine my frustration when my wall meant to comment on the awesome sausage pizza at Francisco’s Pizza on 68th street is being read nearly 13 blocks away. Especially seeing how in that radius, there could be 3 more Francisco’s Pizza shops that have nothing to do with the one I’m referring to. While some people might like the idea of using Graffitio for advertisement as a virtual tractor beam towards fun things, I was always more fond of keeping secret gems like that, well…. secret. But if you discover Francisco’s on your own, I’d more than gladly recommend you the best thing on the menu.

Going back to the idea of using Graffitio in a treasure map sense, I dunno, I feel like it’s cheating to be able to see my wall about a specific location or thing, if you’re not right there in front of it. It would be like Anoopr just going in and reading every single wall ever created on Graffitio. Sure he CAN, sure he could find out some really interesting information on people and different places, but doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? Isn’t that what makes it different from just being an online forum with different threads based on location? That you HAVE to be able to go to a specific place and get pretty close to see what is written?

Sure I’m slightly bias because I live in a densely populated area, but I certainly understand those in more rural areas. It would really suck if the only walls you ever saw were your own. Which is why I’m not sure if there can a 100% crowd pleasing solution. But I do think the closest that you can come to that is by allowing people to set radius options. Allow wall creators to determine their own wall radius, or allow people to set their detection radius, or both! But just being able to see walls that are really far away from me, even if they’re at the bottom of a list, will still ruin the experience for me. Sorry for all the would-be preaching, but that’s just my 2 cents.

My second comment is off topic, but I feel it needs to be addressed. The infinite wall is full of garbage, I don’t really care anymore because I won’t bother to read it again. However, I think it gives an extremely poor first impression to new users. There needs to be an abuse button to report posts or a universal abuse wall or e-mail for addressing inappropriate posts. You said you have the ability to ban individual devices. I think it has come to that point…

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As an urban explorer and gamer I also share this vision of treasure hunting. Thus a tight focus is going to reward us. So the line of questions I would like to consider is starting to evolve:
a) how many of the current user base shares this vision? (i.e., tighter radii=more fun/better. put it however you like)
b) will this feature transmit that vision to current users who are neutral at this time or hadn’t thought of it as an outcome of the app?
c) will this feature cause new users to join who otherwise wouldn’t have?
d) will this feature prevent more users than it promotes?

Parallel to that is the feature you’ve proposed: sort by distance
How much time/experimentation and data do we need to determine if this feature covers the needs, obviating the radius preference?

Finally, removing my Mr. Objective Get Me Data hat: I believe I really would love to set my own pref and/or create pinpoint walls. I mean, how cool is that?? Ooh I can’t even see all the games I’d play :-D

But as someone who still inhabits college towns like Cville, I don’t want a very tight radius. I vote for the big radius sorted in order of distance, showing top 25 (that might even let you expand the 1000m limit to enhance it for those in rural areas–think hikers: a wall at the top of a mountain might reflect both the tiring journey and then the fun of arriving and seeing the view). The idea of a Pinpoint wall sounds neat—but I suspect I’d never ever stumble on one, and I think Graffitio will have the same feeling of a treasure hunt and discovery even with the big radius. Finding a wall is going to be a thrill and a cool little secret regardless.

If the user base gets HUGE, and there are just too many walls, then consider enabling Pinpoint, but try to make it difficult for people to make something like Revolutionary Soup in Cville a Pinpoint wall without realizing it. Maybe only show the option if Graffitio is already showing 25 walls within 100m.