Brightkite already allows you to stay in touch with your friends and be open to meeting new people around the places you visit, all while maintaing comprehensive control over your privacy. We have released a few new features that make serendipitous encounters and privacy management easier.
Place Privacy
We’ve received a few requests for the ability to mark privacy at specific locations as “Always Private” or “Always Public”. Now you can.
Place privacy is a useful and fail safe way to make sure your privacy is set to the proper mode at sensitive locations. For example, I have set my home address to “Always Private” and my work address to “Always Public”.
To add Place Privacy:
- Browse to the desired place page and click on “Privacy at this place”
- Choose your desired privacy and set the radius
- Click Update
People Near Me
With the addition of “People Near Me” feature we’ve made it easier to view, interact with, and meet the people around you. “People Near Me” will show you who is currently checked in near you within a configurable radius.
To view people checked in near you:
- Click on “People near me” in the left hand nav
- Choose Map view or List view
- Adjust the desired radius
Nearby People at a Place
Another small note worthy feature related to “People Around Me” is “Nearby People” at a place. You can view “Nearby People” by browsing to any place page and clicking on the “Nearby People” tab.
The above features are available through the Brightkite developer API as well as in the mobile versions. We hope you find these features useful. Thanks again for your continued feedback and support!
One more thing: We are actively looking for people to join our team.
Systems Administrator
http://topshelfapp.com/job/?u=10&j=51
Ruby on Rails Technical Lead
http://topshelfapp.com/job/?u=10&j=50
Now you can let those around you discover who you are in the online world, while you are out in the the real world. Put your profiles in your pocket by adding your various online services to your Brightkite profile.
iPhone and mobile profiles showing “Elsewhere” links
To add your services to your Brightkite profile:
- Go to Account Settings and click your Profile tab.
- Choose a service and follow the instructions on how to enter your username
- Click Add
- Choose another service to add
- When you have added the desired services click Save.
Brightkite is all about sharing your location and meeting new people based on the places you visit, and the latest way of doing that is with the Brightkite API. Using the Brightkite API you can add a location component to any site, social network, or application.
We are looking for developers interested in helping us beta test the Brightkite API. If you would like access to our API please send a request to api@brightkite.com.
We are excited about the potential mashups and third party integrations. One of the very first sites to integrate the Brightkite API is Socialthing!. Socialthing! is a terrific app that lets you see everything that is going on with your friends from all the sites you use, all in one spot. We are really excited about Socialthing implementing our API. If you haven’t checked it out yet, we highly recommend you do.
User stream on Socialthing showing Brightkite updates
Brightkite configuration options on Socialthing
Between meetings yesterday Martin added support for our shiny new toy, the SPOT Satellite Personal Tracker. Living in Colorado I spend a lot of time in the backcountry, so having the ability to check in far beyond the reach of wifi/cell signals is something I am pretty excited about. At the touch of a button the SPOT will check you in anywhere on earth via satellite. (It even works in the air)
To check in with your SPOT on Brightkite simply add your bkite.com email (yourcode@bkite.com) to your recipient list on the SPOT website. Your SPOT checkins will now appear on Brightkite.
With the release of the App Store today, those of you with iPhones have probably been searching for the native Brightkite iPhone app, and wondered why they couldn’t find it. The truth is, while we would have loved to have the app available today, we decided not to release it just yet. Here is why:
- We don’t have a 3G iPhone to test on yet. More specifically, we’d like to see how well the GPS in the new phones works.
- We don’t want to release something that’s not rock-solid. And by rock-solid, we don’t mean crashing, but rock-solid from a usability standpoint. The app should be as easy to use as possible. We have some very ambitious goals concerning the user interface, but getting it just right takes time and we’re just not quite there yet.
Of course, this doesn’t make you any less anxious to try our app. So when is it coming out? While we don’t have an exact release date, we’ll commit to having it available by the end of the month. Thanks for being patient, and we think you’re really going to like what the app has to offer.
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If you didn’t get that, you probably won’t get Gnip’s name either. Regardless, we just started publishing all publicly-viewable Brightkite activity, including checkins, notes and photos, to recently launched data portability service Gnip. Here’s what they do in a nutshell:
We push activity to them, and instead of us getting bombarded with requests from social aggregation services every few seconds (SocialThing, FriendFeed, etc.), we can point them to Gnip and let them deal with it. The big upsides for aggregation services: no rate-limiting, and a uniform way to know when new data is available.
If you’re a developer, have a look at Gnip: it might just make your life a whole lot easier.
