First Impressions: Brightkite

Brightkite.com

Brightkite.com

Brightkite.com – The location based social network
From their main site:
What is Brightkite?
-Location-based social networking
-Discover who visits your favorite places. Join the community in real time.

Track your friends
-See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time.

Meet people around you
-Meet real world friends. Reveal your location, befriend, and chat with people around you.

I received an invite to Brightkite.com the other day and first impressions are that it’s a pretty cool idea. Think of the messaging of a twitter/plurk but based more around your current location. So instead of just putting your current status you also “check in” to where you are. There’s a search field on every page, where you go in and type out the location of where you are, wether you know the exact address or just the zip code the search will return your location where you can “check in” if you want and see what activity is going on around you.

Brightkite.com 90210

Brightkite.com 90210

Figured I’d try the most popular zip code in the US(90210) and see what was happening out there…not too much activity except for one guy about to head home. You can change the radius from from your search location from 20 meters to 4000 meters so that you can get an idea of who is really close by to those who are in the same town as you. Unfortunately if you are in a location where there aren’t too many Beta people, then you are out of luck on the activity going on and will get the same 2-3 people popping up in your area.

As for the mobile version, I’ve only visited the iPhone web version. Works basically the same as the site but it sucks that you still have to manually input your location on your phone. Hopefully there is a app in the works(or out there that I’m not aware off) that will work with picking up your location on a 3G iPhone.

Unfortunately for me there is no activity where I am at in South FL but you can still browse the entire network of recent activity which is good since you can see what everyone is posting about and make new contacts. Overall, the site has some very cool features and looks promising in it’s niche of location based networking. If anyone want’s an invite just ask!

01. August 2008 by Gabe Diaz
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