Many of you know by now that I’ve recently gone on a pretty lengthy road trip. Well, I’m now settled (sort of) and the journey is done. After the trip I had a couple of observations made along the trip (mostly headed West on I-84) regarding the use of social location check-in and how to be more productive doing so.For safety reasons mostly, I elected to checkin from various stopping points along my journey – this to help keep friends and family aware of where I was and to ensure them that things were going well – I highly suggest this use of foursquare, gowalla, loopt, or any other location checkin service.
The biggest issue though is carrier reliability. As you can imagine, at many points along the way, cell coverage was scarce or down to a mere one bar or half a bar (I was using iPhone on AT&T). Many times though I was very frustrated at not being able to upload photos, the upload service crapping out half way through – this was happening very often and even when the cell signal seemed very strong… yes indeed, good old, dependable AT&T!
This got me wondering though, what if I absolutely needed to upload a photo for safety concerns.. perhaps stumbling onto an accident on the interstate, or if I get in an accident and don’t know where I am but want to blast a photo to help identify me, or perhaps I’m in a restroom at a rest stop and being mugged… there’s loads of possibilities and fine solutions that can be provided by social location check-in. THE most reliable solution I found is to use Pegshot (see pegshot.com or see @Pegshot). The service, like many others is focused on social check-in, with your uploads being linked to Twitter and facebook but unlike foursquare, Pegshot supports uploading digital images and video… and best of all, the service uploads FAST, very fast! The service definitely rocks and the Colorado-based start-up has done a great job fine-tuning their algorithms to ensure a quick and painless upload. Well done PegShot! You can see my Pegs HERE