Brightkite – Where am I doing?
There are a number of Mac/iPhone programs I use on a regular basis. Brightkite just got added to the mix. It’s currently in Beta, but it’s incredibly useful in it’s current state.
So what is Brightkite? Here’s how they describe it:
Location-based social networking
Discover who visits your favorite places. Join the community in real time.Track your friends
See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time.Meet people around you
Meet real world friends. Reveal your location, befriend, and chat with people around you.
The Brightkite team seems to be a great crew and they’re working hard at refining the service. They’re also pretty enthusiastic and helpful when listening to suggestions, complaints, and bug reports. I like how they’re using Get Satisfaction, as their customer service portal.
One of the biggest integrations I’d love them to do is more Twitter functionality. Brightkite has the ability to update your Twitter status and location, but I’d love to be able to access my Twitter stream from within the Brightkite application. They currently have no plans for this, but I’m always hopeful.
You don’t need a Jailbroken iPhone to use Brightkite…you don’t even need an iPhone. It also works through SMS and the web. And thanks to the great work by Tony aka complex, there’s now a generic mobile version of the site. You can access that by going to http://m.brightkite.com on your mobile phone.
An iPhone-native app is in the works and I’m looking forward to it.
If you’d like an invitation, click on the link above.
You can find me here: CeeDubb’s Brightkite Stream
I’ll use Twitter…more specifically Twinkle…for replies and quick little train-of-thought stuff.
Plurk is winning me over because it handles train-of-thought updates and is proving to be a much more useful SNS application for communication with other users. It automatically threads responses for a more organized conversation. It still needs some tweaks, but is evolving quite nicely.
If Plurk would update and tap into Twitter, there’d be no reason to really use Twitter at all. Most people don’t really use the actual Twitter site, they use some type of 3rd party application that taps into Twitter’s API. It’s my opinion that Twitter would make an excellent aggregator of all the SNSs and can possible base a business model off of that.