Last week I managed to get an invite for
Brightkite.
Brightkite is a site offering “location-based social networking” and includes a number of features to allow you to do just that.
Brightkite allows you to update your profile by posting micro-blogs (is a similar way to
Twitter) or photos about your current location. These posts can be viewed by selected friends or everyone, depending on your privacy settings. Your location is updated either manually via the website, email or mobile (US only). You can also allow Brightkite to be updated by
Fire Eagle which is handy too.
As well as linking to Fire Eagle, you can link your Brightkite account to Twitter (which explains the small similarity) and will be useful for a lot of people. Brightkite can automatically post your updates to Twitter as well as update your current location.
The main selling point of Brightkite is how it can be used to discover people (or places) that are close to your current location. For example, you could set your location to some bar in London and then find out your friend was in a café around the corner (while posting a photo of the bar you’re in).
Brightkite does seem to be a well thought out idea and so far, it’s been implemented quite well. I like the fact you can link it to Twitter and Fire Eagle but I’d like to see interaction with some more social sites (
Facebook,
Flickr, etc). I think this is probably one of the reasons I’ve not fully utilised it yet. Brightkite would probably gain more followers and begin to build a good sized community around if it played more with others and was less stand-alone.
Anyway, it’s still early days and I’m interest to see what happens, so I’m going to continue to keep an eye on Brightkite. I’ll hopefully see a lot more developments.
Watch this space!