BrightKite the next best thing since Twitter

Yesterday I got my BrightKite Beta invite and within 5 minutes, I’d setup an account and invited Jim, Tom and Greg.

Brightkite describes itself as….

Location-based social networking

I think it sums up what is does very well. To go into more detail, imagine Twitter but with your location added to each tweet, and the ability to post photos with a tweet and a location, and the added bonus of being able to see not only your friends streams in with yours (ala Twitter) but also streams for specific locations.

It’s a very exciting idea. If you had a ton of friends and were always out and about (neither of which really apply to me these days), it would be priceless.

You arrive at “Joe’s Bar”, checkin on the BrightKite iphone web app (more on that later), once checked in you see that you have 2 friends also checked into the bar, and you have 4 friends who are at “Bob’s Bar” round the corner. You can immediately find your friends and suggest you all go round to corner to meet up with the rest of the crew. Awesome.

The possibilities for meeting up with people out and about, at conferences, whilst travelling, etc, etc is endless.

How many times have you been talking with someone about something and half way through they say “no way, I was there too, it would have been awesome if we’d have met up”.

The icing on BrightKit is their interface work. The web app, feels more complete and finished than Twitter does with it’s “prototype” feel. It does pull influence from Twitter on many levels. Someone yesterday mentioned that BrightKite is a nice extension to Twitter. I actually prefer to think of Twitter being a nice extension to BrightKite - Brightkite even includes the ability to post your BrightKite content to your Twitter feed, something that almost everyone here at work has started doing.

The BrightKite iphone web app is one of the best I’ve seen. It doesn’t use an OOTB UI kit, so it has a unique look and feel, yet it feels native and very responsive. My biggest wish was that in stream views I wish it auto updated using Ajax so you didn’t have to reload the whole page to see if someone’s posted something.

It was commented that the lack of an API (currently, it’s in the works), means that there is no Twitterific style desktop application. As a stand in however I downloaded Fluid and converted the BrightKite iPhone web app into a self contained desktop app, which I use almost exclusively.

The Cherries on the top. For me, the bit I saw I was happiest about was the ability to post updates via email. It’s the usual process (you’ve seen it at flickr is you have an account). Your BrightKite account comes with a unique email address. You can then email text or images from anywhere and they will update your location or post notes and images based on your current location. Personally this is the thing I love the most. I love taking random location based photos and then getting a map of where they are, what I was doing when I took them etc.

There is talk on the BrightKit and other blogs, of a possible native iPhone 2 app. Hopefully they will add support for GPS updates using the native iPhone location and ideally native photo upload that doesn’t require email. At that point BrightKite becomes my new favorite tool.

BrightKit is still in beta and invites are limited (I’m out for now, so I can’t currently hook anyone up).

Keep an eye out for it, I think they’ll have a lot of exciting things going on over the next few months.

(if any BK people happen across this, and you’re looking for API testers, let me know, BrightKite would be a perfect addition to iwentaway.com and iwillbeaway.com).