The Evolution of Location

September 14th, 2010

Today we are rolling out a new home page, and wanted to take a moment to explain our focus as we evolve. Simply, we are focusing our efforts where we are seeing the fastest user growth, and where we believe we can build greatest long term value for you, our users.

Expanding on that a little, we pioneered the location based check-in over two years ago and millions of users have registered for Brightkite and a million of you continue to use our services each month. We said at the end of 2009 that we thought the check-in was becoming a commodity – and we believe that has now happened. The ability to seamlessly use your phone to tell your friends where you are and post this into a social network is a feature we expect to see everywhere, and not be one that defines any company. So what are we focusing on?

What are we focusing on?

Improving mobile messaging

Text messaging hadn’t altered for 20 years, but we’ve changed that. A principle focus is to push the boundaries of text messaging with groups, location, images and more.

Sharing location

Location is the foundation of Brightkite and remains a core focus. You will see location in everything we do – from product to local discounts and promotions. We allow you to share your location broadly to your social networks and with Group Text privately to a hand-picked group of friends.

Places

We will continue to ensure that we snap you to the right place – making sure that we have the broadest, most accurate selection of places and can propose the right place(s) based on your location and location history.

Where are we going to partner?

Social graphs

We don’t have ambitions to become the latest social graph. We believe that you carry around a great social graph in your pocket (your phone’s contact list) and recognize that you’ve spent a lot of effort building out at least one other social network (for many of us this is Facebook). So, we wont require your friends to join Brightkite to use the service and we’ll leverage the networks of friends you’ve already built elsewhere.

Check-in

We pioneered the check-in several years ago, but as we’ve said believe it is now a commodity. Expect to see less and less emphasis on checking in on Brightkite, and associated streams of user content. Where appropriate, we’ll support checking in to third party services like Facebook and Foursquare. This is an extension of the philosophy we started with check.in in the Spring. Keep a look out for some great new Brightkite features using the Facebook API for check-ins.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback as we grow and evolve.

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Posted by lanky at 2:15 PM in Uncategorized

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