Brightkite - a geosocial network

Brightkite is a geosocial network. Based loosely on twitter-style short messages, but with a much stronger leaning towards location awareness.

I’ve used both the standard Brightkite website and also their iPhone optimized site for many months. There are three things I really like about Brightkite. Firstly, they’ve done a great job in making the application agnostic. I don’t care if I’m accessing Brightkite via Safari on my Mac in my office, using the iPhone optimized site or now, the native iPhone application (link to the iTunes store). While obviously the look is slightly different, the feel is alway the same.

Secondly, Brightkite is great at getting my location. When access from a desktop or notebook computer, Brightkite will do a pretty good job at guessing your location either by using the Loki plugin, or Mozilla Geode (more here and here). When using your iPhone, Brightkite will use CoreLocation to discover your location. I like the way the iPhone native application will sort your placemarks by what it thinks is nearest to your estimated location. When the estimated location isn’t quite right, you can “pick a place”, by searching for your actual location. It’s nice that locations are named, rather than just co-ordinates, it’s a nice human-friendly touch.

Lastly, the balance between openness and privacy is ideal, and customizable. For example, if I want to make my exact location known or hidden, or obfuscated (Brightkite calls this “City” and is really just your location generalized to a larger area), a simple switch lets me do this. I can also set privacy levels for different categories of contacts, including trusted friends, friends and everyone else.

This aspect makes it ideal for meeting fellow Brightkite users in real-world social gatherings. Use Brightkite to see who’s nearby and send them a message!

In fact, it’s how I met Brightkite founder Martin May, at a recent Tech Cocktail event in Boulder.

Of course, Brightkite lets you stream your consciousness a’la most other social networks, via a simple URL:

http://brightkite.com/people/nickt

This will take you to my stream of checkins, photos and notes.

It can also stream directly to twitter, and meta-update services like ping.fm support updating Brightkite. Links to services like Facebook, Flickr and Linked-In are available via your profile page.

Here’s a video demo of the Brightkite iPhone app in action.