Brightkite: Twitter + Maps + Photos
I got my hands on a Brightkite beta invite and played around with the app today. It’s a really interesting Twitter-like service for sharing your location and status with friends or people nearby. I’ve been interested in this concept for a while. I wrote about it here a few times and even won a Hack Day competition at Yahoo! for a proof of concept that I put together to show the power of a location-aware Twitter app (I believe I hold the dubious distinction of being the only non-technical person to win Hack Day at Yahoo!). Techcrunch covered a similar service called Fireball that launched today. I also tried that, but Brightkite is much more advanced at this point.
With Brightkite you can:
- Post short text messages and photos via SMS, email, and the web.
- Update your location with as much or as little granularity as you like (ie. exact address, city only, etc).
- View updates from friends or from people near you (ie. show me messages from anyone at the Web 2.0 conference today).
- Automatically copy your updates to your Twitter account.
- Automatically post your location to FireEagle, so other apps can use that data.
- Bookmark your favorite locations for easier entry in the future (eg. I bookmarked the address for my apartment as “home” and now just send “@home” messages rather than the full street address).
These types of services are going to be really popular and powerful, particularly once they are better integrated with the iPhone and GPS devices that know your location without the need to enter an address.
Update: the invites are all gone.
I have 3 Brightkite invites. If you want one, leave your email address in the comments.
