Originally Posted by dba
Isn't there some way to do the map semi-automatically using the primary TCP/IP address of registrants (I know there are services that attempt to map TCP/IP addresses to actual physical locations, plus or minus a few miles). Maybe it wouldn't work for everyone but it ought to pick up another few thousand people.
They could be added anonymously until they agreed to have their location posted publicly, but it would give folks a better sense of the geographical spread of FTers.
Two considerations I guess; is it possible, and would you want it. I think it's impractical and probably not desirable. But that hasn't stopped many an idea, not least as I could be wrong
It's probably possible with a chunk of effort. First you need an IP address for each FT account. The site admin could probably collect that if they ignored the privacy concerns. You'd want account email address too if it wasn't anonymous, otherwise people would not be able to remove or change their own settings.
There are public databases that will make a reasonable guess on where someone is from their IP address. Here's an example lookup site:
http://www.seomoz.org/ip2loc/ip2loc.php
It will say it doesn't know sometimes, and it will get it right sometimes. Still, I guess it would be correct 80+% of the time that it offers an opinion.
After that you need to inject that into frappr, that would involve writing a script or getting someone to spend days putting it in one at a time.
As to wanting it. Well - i think a *seperate* map of just the IP addresses everyone came from would be. So one person who logs in a lot from different IP addresses, maybe his ISP changes his DSL IP address every day, would appear the same as many people who log in once each. But still fun.
Sorry if I'm down on the suggestion. The idea of mapping from IP address is a very cool one in general. I may steal that at some point if you don't mind. But I'm not sure it's practical here.