Brightkite - Do You NEED To Know Where I Am?
Nagoya - Recently a colleague of mine and I had a Skype chat about what makes a microblogging site start to fade. Jaiku and Pownce topped our list as web services over the past year intending to be the next “Twitter Killer”. Both failed. Our conclusion was if you want to succeed, DON’T try to beat Twitter, join in by creating a service which works WITH Twitter.
Brightkite understood this lesson and has taken note.
Brightkite is a yet another microblogging service with one particular niche - geotagging. For many this is a big yawn or something which is too complicated, too cumbersome or outright scary to bother with. I totally agree in many ways. We don’t all have GPS or Navi systems built into our portable devices to automatically acknowledge our coordinates. Playing around with Google Map apps to “pinpoint” our location is also very much a pain. Also, and this applies for most of us, do we REALLY WANT to say, “I’m EXACTLY at this location at this moment”? Bye-bye privacy. Hello anxiety for personal safety.
For someone like myself, Brightkite IS cool for one simple reason. I’m living in Japan. Since Brightkite synchronizes WITH Twitter, my Tweets and daily notes DO become much more relevant and interesting for those following my adventures (regardless of how NOT exciting they are). I don’t need to always say, “Here in Japan…”. It just becomes part of the Lifestream. The addition of adding photos to the stream just sweetens the deal more. (I use the Shozu service BTW. It allows me to upload to Flickr, Zooomr, AS WELL as Brightkite all with a single e-mail upload.. very nifty).
Brightkite addresses the hassle of “pinpointing” your location with Placemarkers. Similar to Twitterverse using the “L:home” feature to acknowledge certain words or place names to be associated with locations, Brightkite allows you to set your “home” as wherever, your “work” as wherever and other places you frequent as well. Yes, this DOESN’T work as well when you are traveling and you are not familiar with where you are going to go, but the manual placement of locations at the time of uploading your photos or notes through the Brightkite website can overcome this issues. Essentially, a “@ home” e-mail or SMS will steer you from there. Special note: If you are NOT in N. America, simple addresses WON’T work.. so you WILL have to enter coordinates. A great site such as itouchmap does the job for me.
In regard to privacy, the issue really can be solved by the user. It’s not necessary to put in the EXACT location. Since I personally can’t use addresses, it’s easy for me to pinpoint “around” where I am, and not my exact residential home. Last year I often used a McDonald’s at a train station I use to pass by all the time. This year I’m using a beautiful fountain in Tsurumai Park, a location not too far away from where I live, but certainly not a pinpoint (plus it looks really cool from the air anyway). I’m not really sure WHY people have to put their EXACT personal location. Business perhaps, but home? I don’t think so.
Brightkite still has a way to go with features and services and yes, like Twitter itself at the beginning, is a little difficult to justify when explaining it to non-techie friends. Regardless, they have the right ideas in the right place and know how to “get along” with the other services on the Internet… a key issue for preventing it to be just another once shiny object abandoned in the web services dead pool.
Give it a try and connect with me! 
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