BrightKite: First Impressions
I finally got my invite for the web 2.0 application BrightKite, so here are my initial impressions.
BrightKite is very much like Twitter, where you can post little notes to people on your friends list as well as the general public. Its main feature is the ability to also encode ‘where’ your posts are coming from. For example, if I had a GPS-enabled phone and I sent an update to BrightKite, not only will my post show up on the site but it will also show where I posted it from. Of course there are several privacy issues here (beware the stalkers!), but the site does provide a good amount of privacy features. What’s also pretty neat is you can view the public stream based on where you are, so you can see recent posts that originated from your area. For those of us without GPS-enabled devices, the option to add places manually on the site is there so we’re not completely left in the dark.
I can definitely see the coolness of using an application like this, especially when a lot of your friends get into it (with this being a social networking site and all…). You can set it to automatically update your Twitter with your BrightKite posts as well as add locational information to it, so you won’t need to message two different places if you have Twitter account too. Unfortunately, you can’t text message updates yet if you’re not in the US, but I imagine this will be rectified when it comes out of beta. I guess I have even more motivation to upgrade my phone now…