Thursday, November 20, 2008

A Couple of Weeks With Britekite

OK, it's been a couple of weeks playing with Brightkite. I thinks its a pretty cool and app and from what I can tell it seems to have a strong devo group working on it. If social-networking is in it infancy, then location-based social-network is still in the zygotic stage. Loopt seems to have made big inroads with the iPhone crowd, that they are a selling point in the Apple's new commericials shows which basket they are putting their eggs. Back to Brightkite: a cool app and lots of potential. I like the idea of being able to see not only who is near me at any given time, but also what is happening around me, events and other stuff. The challenge that I see with BK, like all such apps, is the user base. The user base with all such apps will always have resistence from "Digital Immigrants" but will grow exponentially with "digital natives". Right now, BK simply doesn't have a great user base here is Los Angeles. Perahps it will grow, and I'll continue to work with it for a while, but right now I'm not getting too much out of it. In fact, the only comments I've gotten so far is from by Facebook community asking "Dude why are you always telling us where you are?!?!?" For the mean time, I'll take updates off from Twitter and FB.
Note to BK develpment team: keep it up and get the G1 port completed!

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

BrightKite

I've been playing with the website for a week or so now. I'll write a full review next week. They've ported it the iPhone with plans to port to Android (G1) soon. It has a lot of potential, but like all social networking sites it all depends on the # of users to be useful.

Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.