Peace.

Don’t be sad and angry! Graffitio wouldn’t be any fun if it were just us using it. The Infinite Wall was created so people who opened the app for the first time would have something to interact with. I never expected to have thousands of users with walls all over the world. Try to think of the Infinite Wall as a tourist trap: it’s loud, obnoxious, and annoying, but it diverts them from the rest of the walls, keeping them quieter for us locals. If you’re still pissed about it, it was my wife’s idea. Seriously. :)

It makes me sad and angry when I think about how much different the Graffitio community feels here on the blog versus on the infinite wall. It’s like anonymity releases people to be idiots and have no restraint! Where’s our intelligence people!?

Anoop: Eat a brat for me! Hope your trip to Germany doesn’t end with a trip to your lawyer! :)

As for your privacy concerns, I’ll be honest: I don’t know. You raise legitimate and serious points, and I’d like to address them in the future. I’ll need to consult with people knowledgeable in these things. In the mean time, I will say that the data is well secured, and I will not be giving it out to anyone who asks. In the event that a government agency (of any country) requests access to the data, my first trip will be to a lawyer. I will try to exercise all legal options to protect the privacy of Graffitio’s users.

To repeat my previous (deleted) post: Could you please explicitly address the issue of user privacy? Now that this app keeps track of the machine ID of people who post comments, do we need to worry about who will have access to what we have posted? In particular, under what circumstances will this information be available to law enforcement authorities?

This is particularly an issue in places like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and basically, anywhere where freedom of speech is curtailed. But it may well also become an issue for users in other parts of the globe. (Hint, hint.)

I can’t believe that instead of addressing this very serious concern, you’d delte my post. That’s very telling. Shame.

For instance: if someone posts on the infinite wall that they just burned their fingers on their roach clip, where would that information end up? Suppose they were in Singapore at the time. It would matter (a lot).

If this app does not guarantee user privacy, that’s fine. But that’s something that needs to be made explicit.

Btw, I would guess that until privacy is assured, you can expect people not to post anything remotely controversial on the infinite wall. Cocktalk is crude but also safe.

Peace.

I’ve started a number of walls in my little town of Reno. I’ve seen one response in the more than a week that I’ve been using this app. Yesterday, after uploading v2, I that one wall had been getting responses for three days, but I just couldn’t see them! In fact, it had a great deal of responses, including some from the people that worked at the location. This lasted about (no kidding) 10 seconds. Now I can only see MY OWN response again. Whats worse, most of my responses weren’t on the wall when I could the other responses.

So, in reality, I’m sitting here playing with myself. I don’t know which walls are a copy only I can see, and which walls are actually public. I don’t know if the version I see can be seen by others, and I don’t know if I’m missing real posts by other peopele!

This makes the app more than useless. Why is there more than one version of a wall? Why I’m I seeing somesort of hybrid private/public wall? Why could I see the public version of the wall for 10 seconds last night, and now only get some locally cached version now?

Another thing is with disappearing walls. Why do some walls disappear after I create them? I’ve created some walls three or four times. When I could actually see some of the posts to the wall I discuss above, I couldn’t see walls that I can see now that I can’t see the other posts. In otherwords, entire walls most likely exist only on my iPhone. Now that I’m back to seeing my cached version of walls, I can see them.

When I discovered that a conversation had actually ensued on one of my walls, I was really happy. But i think it died after three days when due to the fact that no one was seeing responses other than my original post. Now I’m sad because I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake in my wall world. I don’t want to do any more posting because I don’t know if I’m really posting to anywhere other than my own phone.

Since this problem persists into v2, it has me concerned that the problem is deeply rooted. I really hope v3 works correctly, but if not, I’m giving up. The sad thing is that this is a small town, and I may have missed my window to make this app work while everyone was testing their new iPhones and playing with the app store. Who knows if they’ve dumped the app thinking no one is out there? I know I’ve killed a dozen apps myself since there wasn’t anyone in Reno but me playing with that app.