The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

I’m kicking off the previously mentioned focus on Social Media Technology and Tools by introducing you to BrightKite.

Brightkite describes itself as a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. This is a white hot category in the social network space. Location based services have been rapidly springing up. Their intent is to make it easier to let your friends know where you are, meet up with people in your area, or find out information about your location. One of the cooler things it does is that it easily lets you see what people around you are doing.

Brightkite is a really a marriage of micro-blogging and location-based features. It’s a slick tool that is broken down into the following:

Around Me - View users nearby your current location. See what they are up to. Make new friends.

Brightkite Universe - View all the public activity on Brightkite (note: the service is not limited to the US).

Live Friends Map - See where your friends are at a neighborhood, city, state and world zoom level.

Place Pages - See who visits your favorite places and what they post there, in real-time.

Visited Places - Keep track of all the places you go.

Sharing - Brightkite can share your content with Twitter & Fire Eagle

SMS Interface - Although this post shows BrightKite on a fancy phone, you can interact with Brightkite on any phone via text message (SMS) in addition to the mobile version of the site http://m.brightkite.com

Bkite also says they will soon be making an API available. This would be a fantastic change, as it would allow third party developers to innovate and build new applications and services on top of the BrightKite platform, much like what Facebook and Twitter have done.

Tags: brightkite, innovation, social networking