I really like using Twitter. In fact, I can think of a number of reasons people might benefit from the service. I have seen direct, positive impacts in my own life because I’m on it fairly regularly, and though I don’t think it’s the perfect service for everyone, it’s a pretty good one for me.
Enter Brightkite.
At this point it’s an invite only service, and after weeks of waiting I finally got an invite. I’ve been playing with it for a few days now. Brightkite is a lot like Twitter, but also lets you post photos and location information. As I love multimedia and I love the evolution of web=computer to web=everyday life, I love Brightkite.
So now I’m stuck trying to decide where to spend more time. I don’t have as many friends on Brightkite and there aren’t as many widgets for Brightkite as there are for Twitter. Part of what makes Twitter make sense through the workday is Twhirl, after all.
But Brightkite has some really interesting granular privacy settings, and lets you push content to Twitter, so I’ve been able to adjust my microblogging behavior. Here’s how I’ve set mine up, in case you want to push from Brightkite to Twitter:
First, set it up so your privacy is private:
Modify your account settings for privacy. Change to the red lock icon. This will allow you to customize what people can see. Then you can change information for checkins (about location) and posts (photos and “bites,” the short statements like tweets). I chose to keep my exact location hidden from everyone I don’t know, but make my post totally visible to everyone. I let friends (or contacts) see what city I’m in, and trusted friends (friends) see exactly where I am. I think at a conference I would change this so that friends and trusted friends would see exactly where I am in case we’re trying to meet up for coffee or a meal or something.
Finally, in Brightkite, I changed my account settings for sharing to Twitter. Again, I said to post notes, photos, and to change the location in my account sidebar to my Brightkite location.
So now my Brightkite posts come to Twitter like this:
I still keep Twitter running in Twhirl and get some tweets to my cell phone. If there is a conversation happening in Twitter, I reply there. But my own posts, for now, are originating in Brightkite. And I’m waiting for more friends to join me. I wish I had more invites… they only give 3 when you get an account. Hopefully they’ll be sending out more soon.
This reminds me a lot of SocialLight, which I was super excited about three years ago. And Dodgeball, which would have been awesome if it had ever made it to be available beyond their core cities. This, however, makes up where the other two are lacking, and looks to be a lot more interesting. Hope to see you there!!
Update: Fixed the Twitter photo, thanks to Jenny!
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Comments 8
This is great Lauren. Thank you. The only trouble I’m having determining whether to include my home address (it’s public anyway, but…). Since nobody in Ojai is using Brightkite yet, there isn’t really a reason to include the street address. However, if I ever get trusted friends in Ojai, then I could include it so I show up in the “Around Me” tab.
This site does take some mental grasping, but seems to have considerable power. One thing you forgot to mention was how important using SMS can be for managing your account. If you want to set your location and it is one of your placemarks, just send an text that says “@lax” and the cool thing is Brightkite sends you an SMS right back that tells you how many other users are in your location.
So, for me the two areas to grow and learn about are SMS and privacy settings.
Posted 11 May 2008 at 10:24 am ¶Thanks for posting about this, Lauren. I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to use BrightKite and how much, especially since (as you note) there aren’t good widgets for it yet.
Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to friend you on BK. Any ideas? When I put in my username in “discover friends,” it says it couldn’t find anyone I know on the service, which is obviously baloney since you’re on both.
Is the second graphic above the right one? Should it maybe show the “sharing” tab for Twitter?
Again, thanks for sharing your thoughts about BK, and I hope to learn more from watching your use of it.
Posted 11 May 2008 at 3:39 pm ¶Thanks for your comments!
Kenley, I know what you mean about home address. No one here (except for 2 people I invited, and trust) is on the service either, but I think a little bit about technosavvy people with bad intentions knowing exactly when I am out. My hope, there, is that they might know if I’m out, but they hopefully won’t know if *both* my husband and I are out. Thanks for adding the point about SMS! I’m still working out that aspect of the site, and didn’t even realize that I could find the number of users in the area using SMS. I’m using the iPhone interface, mostly, which is really nice, too. I wonder if since there is so much to learn that this service won’t catch on as much…
Jenny, thanks for pointing out the picture issue! I’ll fix that right now! As for the discover friends, that could use some work. After poking around, it looks like the address bar at the top of the page can be used to find people, too:
It’s an interesting experiment, for sure!
Posted 11 May 2008 at 5:48 pm ¶Update! It looks like BrightKite refreshes invites after so long… I have three again if anyone wants one!!
Posted 11 May 2008 at 5:53 pm ¶Thanks for the post! I just started checking out BrightKite last week and I wondered how everyone was sending their posts to Twitter – now I know! The trick now is to get more people who are actually my “friends” to sign up and start using it.
Posted 19 May 2008 at 10:37 am ¶Thanks for posting this. I got my invite a week or two ago but haven’t spent much time on it. I’m pretty sporadic on Twitter, though so I don’t know if I’ll get hooked on brightkite, but I’m off to revisit it!
Posted 19 May 2008 at 3:55 pm ¶Thanks Jennifer & Bobbie! I’m glad it’s helpful. It’s true… the trick really is to get more friends to use it. Hope to see you there!!
Posted 19 May 2008 at 4:22 pm ¶I hope this doesn’t sound too stalkerish or weird, since I found this blog entry from a google search on brightkite and how it could know my location from my phone, but …
I’m a Raleigh-ite too! It made me smile to see someone else from my neck of the woods who wrote such a good and convincing blog entry.
I hope you don’t mind if I read your link on what twitter can do.
Posted 02 Jul 2009 at 11:41 pm ¶Post a Comment