Brightkite and Facebook… now Connected
Today we are excited to announce the addition of Facebook Connect! Some of you may have noticed Facebook Connect (beta) live on the site for a few weeks, with your help we worked out the bugs and today it is official.
What is Facebook Connnect and why does it matter? At a basic level it lets you easily share what you are doing on Brightkite with all your friends on Facebook. With this release you can update your Facebook status and/or publish your location, notes and photos directly to your news feed.
Connect your Facebook account now:
- On Brightkite visit your Account Settings, click on the Sharing tab.
- Authorize Facebook by clicking the link next to all 3 steps.
- Choose your Facebook cross-posting options and click save.
This of course is just the beginning, there is much more to come in terms of Brightkite/Facebook integration. In the meantime stay tuned by connecting your Facebook account, becoming a fan of Brightkite on Facebook and letting us know what you think.
NOTE: While authorizing Facebook it’s important to complete all 3 steps.
Posted by Brady Becker at 1:41 PM in Facebook, Product 25 comments
I love the new Facebook integration, but I'm starting to become overwhelmed with managing all of these "statuses". There's one for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for Brightkite, and just about every other social network. I would like my notes from Brightkite to just show up in my feed along with the place kind of like they post to Twitter. Keep up the good work!
Hi Max. Glad you like the integration! Expect some updates to Brightkite <-> Facebook integration in the coming weeks/months. We are aiming to make as easy as possible to share what you do on Brightkite in a relevant way depending on the service… However I do agree management could become a problem depending on the scale that a given user chooses to share at.
You can set brightkite to update twitter, and facebook to get updates from twitter (search for "twitter" application in facebook), so then you just update brightkite, which updates twitter, which updates facebook, and you only post in 1 place (brightkite)! There, no more overwhelming! :)
Done! This was nicely put together. The steps on the integration process look clean, neat. and very professional. Well done.
If I've been using the beta version, how can I switch to the new version?
Hi Rick. You must first delete the Brightkite application on FB. To do this visit your authorized applications on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?v=allowed. Next relink your FB on Brightkite http://brightkite.com/me/config?section=sharing Done.
Great! Now I can stop using Loopt. I had stopped using brightkite because loopt already had this…so now maybe I'll come back!
After a year of trying and testing many social networking sites I have settled on Brightkite, Facebook and Twitter as my 3 favorites. And now that Brightkite updates both Facebook and Twitter this is like icing on the cake! I love it! You folks at Brightkite are the BEST!!!!!
Although I do love your work…you are not making it easy on me. I am now going to be more sidetracked than ever. If you weren't so successful at what you do, than I may get some work done. (excellent!!) I am a firm follower and fan. Love your work.
I definitely have to agree with Mary.
Update: We just added the ability to make status vs feed an option per action type. For example my checkins go to my news feed, notes and photos to status, etc…
Awesome! One little "would be cool if" thing — let us customize the updates like we can customize the Twitter updates. ;-) I know FB has some restrictions, but at least let us change the prepended verb.
This is something we plan on implementing.
For some reason when I first followed your steps above, the integration seemed to work smoothly. But now when I checkin, my news feed is no longer updated in FB.
Okay I went into my Account Settings – Sharing, and it appeared that I had not completed the 3 steps (but I clearly remembered doing this the first time). So I went and re-clicked all 3 steps again and got a message that FB had already authorized me. I re-saved. Let's see if this fixes the issue.
I'm having the same problem now. It worked before, but now not so much.
Hi Aaron. You are still having issues? We will look into it.
Hey man. I will test some more tomorrow. Basically, when I do a checkin, it posts to Facebook fine, but when I do a checkin + note or checkin + photo (on iPhone, anyway) it doesn't pull through on Facebook at all. I'll make sure to give it a whirl tomorrow morning and see what happens.
This is simply amazing, and you are making it too easy. Like Andrew I was using Loopt for something similar to this before, but now that brightkite is able to do this with facebook I will use brightkite now. Much easier to work than I thought. Will keep you updated with any ideas or problems I have.
Thanks again
Dave
Hi Dave. Glad you like it! Let us know if you have any suggestions.
Brady,
So far so good. Keep you posted.
Thanks,
Dave
hey all, this is great stuff here. quick question- i have my check-ins set to post into my FB news feed, but it seems to lump the items (checkins) all into one day. for example- if i checked into 5 places on any given day, it would always show the last place i checked into and next to the feed item would be a link for 'Show 4 More Posts'.
dont know if thats on the FB side, but i'd like to see each checkin be an individual item in the feed. that way, when i post a picture or note folks can see that it came a few minutes after i checked in someplace.
i guess friends could see where i was if they clicked through on the item- but i wanted to know if there was any way to avoid all my checkins getting grouped together?
Hi Jim, we looked into this and unfortunately it's happening on the FB side, so there's not much we can do.
thats cool. not a huge deal i guess. thanks for the reply :)
hey! its fixed! rock.
Please make a setting so you select which friends within Facebook that can see you location. For instance, if a FB app there is an option to share with your network, a certain friendslist, etc. Right now with this set up everyone on FB can see where you are…frightening!