Brightkite

I’ve been using Brightkite for a while now. If you’re not familiar with it, Brightkite is a location-based mobile social networking site. What does that mean? you ask. It’s like Twitter, but it keeps track of where you posted from. If you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you try it. I’d love to hear your thoughts. For now, I’ll give you mine.

The great thing about Brightkite is that you can meet people based on where you are. Someone that you might have never met is now within reach just because you both use the same service. This is the advantage is has over Twitter. However, the userbase needs to be increased dramatically to enhance the interestingness. If they can accomplish this, then you’ll meet others who are currently checked in nearby, as opposed to a few days later. This happens to me quite a bit – where I’ll see someone of interest who posted, but the post is dated from several days ago.

The folks at BrightKite have done some great things with their web application .

1. Map view of your friends. They display where your friends are checked in on a google map. This is great when you don’t recognize the street names and when you want to get a quick sense of where they are in relation to each other.
2. Privacy Control. You may not want everyone on the internet to know where you are all the time. Brightkite has built-in some controls to manage your privacy. They let you mark which friends are trusted. Those are the people who can see your exact location all the time. There are also just normal friends. Below your menu, is a privacy switch. When set to public, everyone can see your location and posts at full accuracy. When set to private, strangers see your checkins at the city level but no posts, your normal friends can see your checkins and posts at the city level, and your trusted friends get to see your checkins and posts at full accuracy.
3. Sharing with other sites. Under “Account Settings” there is a sharing tab. It identifies other sites that you can send your brightkite information to. Currently they support Twitter and Fire Eagle. I’ve never looked at Fire Eagle, but I’m actively using the Twitter sharing. Brightkite sends my info to Twitter when I post a note or photo. I did for a while also send my check-ins but that has zero value to a Twitter user, imho.

There are some things that I would change. Lets call them opportunities for improvement.

1. Email interface for photo uploads. Brightkite assigns a unique email address to you. They instruct you to send your photo to that unique address. A simple as email is , sending photos to brightkite doesn’t work for me. the mobile version of gmail doesn’t allow you to send attachments. It’s just not available. You can make the argument that this is a gmail problem. Never the less, I’m still not able to post photos from my mobile. If Brightkite had a file upload on their site for uploading photos, this would be a non-issue.
2. Placemark names not utilized fully. Placemarks are used to identify places that you go to often, and allows you to assign a nickname to it. The nick names are not used when you check into a place that doesn’t already have a name, like an intersection. For example I might have an address of “9th & Pine, Seattle, WA, 98101” with a nickname of “Bus stop at Paramount”. When I write a post from that location you will only see the address. I think it would improve the user experience to use the nickname as well.
3. Streamline the interface. Do a place search and enter a business name. If you want to check in at one of the places, you need to click the name. On the new page click the “Check In Here” button. It would be great though if I were able to click “check in here” from the search result. The “visited places” and “place marks” both have that functionality. So why I cant I have it here too. Another thing that bugs me is all have very different looking listings. If they could bring them in line with one another, it’d reduce the time it takes the learn the web app.
4. Symbols. One symbol that you see alot of brightkite is an orange circle icon with a white ‘X’ in the middle. Other applications, outside of brightkite, have taught us that an ‘X’ in a icon means close or delete. So when I see that icon in the placemarks listing, I’m thinking that I can delete the item by clicking the orange circle icon. It will actually bring you to the place stream for the location. That’s confusing to me, and probably to others too. I’d like to see brightkite use the lime green trapezoid in their logo, as that is the placemark icon. It would have a couple of benefits – the ‘kite’ icon doesn’t have any external meanings like the ‘circle with an x’ icon, and it strengthen the association of your location with BrightKite.
5. Editing Placemarks. There is no way to edit a placemark. Many placemark redisplay the address as the name. So, when you checkin and post a note from that location, the address is written out twice. People like names, computers like addresses. That’s a lesson we’ve already learned with DNS. So, I’d like to be able edit the placemark name so that everybody can benefit from it. Also, people make mistakes and there’s no way on brightkite currently to correct them. This alone should be enough to add in the ability to edit.

I’d love to hear what you think.