A Brief Look at: Brightkite for iPhone
Location-based services (LBS) are becoming a dime-a-dozen in Apple’s App Store. Denver-based No Sleep Media’s Brightkite, is more complex LBS social networks, which focus on tracking you and your friends, haven’t yet caught fire. Brightkite just launched its iPhone app. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to.
Brightkite’s featureset will be familiar to users of similar applications like Loop. For users, logging in to Brightkite or Loopt is supposed to open up a whole new world of social interaction. After signing in at a coffee shop, you can see if there are other users in the same shop, in the neighbourhood, or in the city. If friends are nearby, you can send them a message to arrange to meet up
However, Brightkite isn’t quite as simple to use as Loopt. Rather than relying on the assisted–GPS technology in the iPhone and some other mobile phones, as Loopt does, Brightkite requires users to text, e-mail, or post on-line their street address or location in order for the site to log their position. (Assisted GPS uses satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers to determine the position of a device.) But the process isn’t seamless and, after a few weeks of using the service, may still not come naturally to you
Aside from checking into places, you can post notes that are tagged with your location, post photos tagged with your location, see your friends’ activity, send direct messages, post comments on messages, search people, places and posts and you can repost all of your activity automatically to the more popular micro-messaging service Twitter. Curiously however, if you post a picture to Brightkite and have it set to repost to Twitter, it won’t show the picture, just your location on a map. It should show the picture and the map.
Brightkite for iPhone which debuted on the App Store yesterday, is pretty slick I have to say. It’s like having the full Brightkite site (brightkite.com) in your pocket, native, and as far as I can tell, they’ve thought of every aspect and implemented it.
Buy me Coffee for $2
Tell a Friend & Share
October 24th, 2008 13:35
Kudos to brightkite for launching a program that works on all cell phones. However,
I still think that zhiing is better for working around the issue of phones without
LBS.
If you have LBS, you should be able to dynamically map everything.
If not – it should work over SMS.
November 19th, 2008 20:11
Reason why is great to be a gay
You get to jump up and slap stuff. Its joke ^_^