Invites to Brightkite are flying like…kites. The location based social network has received a lot of buzz over the past weeks, and I was lucky enough to secure a beta invite to check it out.
Brightkite serves as a social network that allows users to share and find friends based on location updates. The stream of news (your location updates) is shared with your network. You can include photos and notes to go along with your location. For example, you can say "Starbucks" or "Office", or post a picture noting your location.
Integration with Twitter is key for Brightkite. Here you can see examples of recent updates from @technosailor and @corbett3000:
Cool new features include the ability to search for users, businesses, and even configure your location at varying degrees of accuracy. For example, you can choose to be notified when someone in your network is within 20-4000 meters of your current location.
Buzz Meter Ranking: 2 out of 4 Buzz Bees
Positive: It’s a useful tool to push the formation of real-world interactions from online relationships. It’s still in beta mode so we have a lot of opportunity to see the application evolve.
Negative: Some people may think it’s a little creepy to notify people where you are at any given moment. Privacy issues remain a high priority for mobile and location based services. Although, you can alter privacy settings to "trusted friends" or be vague about your exact location.
Other issues include the fact that it does NOT integrate with Verizon phones, and requires you to manually enter in your location every time instead of leveraging mobile location technology. Brightkite also requires you to join another social network as opposed to fully integrating.
Conclusion: Geo-social networks are important. Bright Kite steps up to the location sharing game, I just hope they are able to keep one step ahead in this crowded web app space.
I’m glad you liked my Pirate Museum Britekite post enough to share it :)
As a part of being an interactive strategist, i have the (un)fortunate task of testing every new web app i can get my hands on to see if it will be relevant for my clients in some way. That being said, 99% of new services don’t stick. Britekite stands out, however, as one i believe will become increasingly important of the come year. I’d give it a 3.5/4 on your buzz meter.
If you’re interested in seeing some more wild britekite’d pics, I posted a ton from Artomatic last weekend:
http://brightkite.com/people/corbett3000