Hey,
While I think it’s cool seeing the overall fastest miles/most completed streets, I would like it if my home page was a bit more like Strava (sorry if that’s blasphemy) where I can see my friends activities.
Then a leaderboard where I have ran the 4th most streets within my friends, but I have ran in 2nd most countries, etc.
Or is the idea that a specific city is the community and you see how you rank % wise among the general population?
Mike
I wanted to second this idea.
Even if not used in a Leaderboard, a simple friends list alone would save me having to bookmark dozens of other users. Even if I could just ‘star’ accounts to follow.
This touches on some privacy concerns, as well.
Some tracking services (I might be wrong, it might be all of them) have separate privacy levels as: private / public / friends-only. So far, I’ve treated “friends-only” as “private”, because there’s no such thing as friends in CityStrides (which sounds much darker than I intended it to sound 
).
I would need to figure out how to migrate all that along, without surprising anyone.
Another decision is whether this is a “friend” or “follow” kind of situation. If it’s just “follow”, then it would probably hinge on whether the ‘followee’ had a public account. If it’s a “friend” thing, then there would need to be approval on both ends - then the public/private aspect might not need to be worried about … or … there would need to be a way to be ‘friends’ without sharing certain info. 
So many edge cases.
And finally, one aspect of CityStrides that has been particularly painful is the entire public/private setup. There are so many people that don’t understand that their activities are public within their run tracking service, and then freak out when their stuff is public here. It’s so much more visible here than it is in the other sites, that it’s very jarring for them. I have keyboard shortcuts for template emails explaining all of this, I have to write it out so much!
This trouble has made me consider, recently, the idea of CityStrides being a private-by-default site. I’ve thought about flipping the switch so everyone is private and only visible to themselves unless they become some level of contributor in order to enable the ‘public’ feature.
There’s a piece of me that hates this idea. I really want this to be a free site that people can optionally contribute to for some particular features – including ‘public’ in that list feels a little heavy-handed, and it is a change that would affect existing users (something else I’ve been trying to avoid) … I’d rather make new features available under paid access than change existing features to paid.
I suppose part of this is also me trying to think of more ways to increase monthly contributors. I’d love to at least break even on the operating costs behind CityStrides. 
Without understanding any of the complexities of interfacing with the multiple tracking sites, I have a few thoughts.
Now that I understand privacy settings are inherited from the tracker site (in my case Runkeeper), I think it would be ideal to have some amount of choice in what is public specific to citystrides. For me personally I only share my runkeeper activites with a small group of friends. I can understand why people might not want to share their individual activities to the public for lots of reasons. Just seeing where you run the most in your community gives an idea of where you live as well as places you frequent.
At the very least I’d still like to be able to share my completion percentage of my city and other places I’ve run without necessarily sharing every individual run route to the public both here and in Runkeeper.
I think my ideal version of sharing my completed runs/routes would be to be able to show an abstracted version of that to the public. To me personally I would want to see every route run like today on my lifemap, and maybe even share that with friends. But to the public the site would only display a single route line based on the street nodes completed. Sort of the opposite of a heat-map of my runs…
As for contributions – I agree the new vs. existing piece is thorny, and you definitely deserve to do better than just break even IMO.
As a contributor myself I would encourage more people to contribute. After spending many, many hours a few years back creating my own lifemap snapshot through a convoluted process of converting my exported gpx files to display in mapbox, finding this site was (and is) a revelation! This stuff isn’t easy.
Yes I had the same thoughts. I do share my Runkeeper details only very occasionally with friends.
So I was surprised I had to set my privacy settings in Runkeeper to everyone, I had rather not do that.
I looked at other people in my city and i can actually see if they are running abroad, good information for burglars 
But I definitely like the easy way Citystrides show walks and runs. So I second the idea of controlling what is shown to other