Author Archive for Brady Becker Page 2 of 4



Keep Your Comments Inline

Inline Comments
A few days ago we quietly released inline commenting. Prior to this update, you had to visit the object page to view and/or write a comment. Now you can conveniently post a comment without leaving the page.

brightkite inline comments

Additionally we have added a “Track this thread” checkbox. If you select this box (selected by default), any comments added to that particular thread will show up in your “Comments” tab. This handy feature helps you stay on top of posts you have commented on or threads you are interested in.

Posts Search
We’ve also added a basic way to search posts. Watch for improvements around this feature in the coming months.
Brightkite Search Posts

We hope you enjoy the improvements
We’re really thrilled about these improvements especially the inline comments. We hope you find these changes as useful as we do. Thanks again for your continued support! Keep watch over the next few weeks for our developer API and native iPhone app.

New Features: Mentions and Comments Streams

We’ve added some neat new features.

Mentions Stream
brightkite mentions

We’ve made it easy to see when when people are talking about you, and/or addressing you in their posts. When people include @yourusername in their posts they will now appear in your mentions stream located under the “Mentions” tab.

Comment Stream
brightkite comments

Want to know when people comment on your posts? Now its easy with the comment stream. Located under the “Comments” tab, the comments stream helps you keep up on comments on new and old posts alike.

Over the coming weeks watch for comment notifications, inline commenting and the Brightkite developer API. As always let us know what you think of these new streams.

FriendFeed, Ping.fm and Hellotxt Add Support for Brightkite

During their Fix-it Day, FriendFeed added support Brightkite and our fellow TechStars team IntenseDebate.

Ping.fm and Hellotxt have also added support for Brightkite. We are excited about these third party services adding support for Brightkite. Keep watch over the next few weeks for our developer API which will enable seamless third party integration and interesting mashsups.

Tired of Sleepless Nights?

Don’t let 3 A.M. SMS notifications keep you from your beauty sleep. Brightkite now has quiet time. To set your quiet hours visit your “Account Settings” and click on the “Notifications” tab.

Quiet time

We’ve Added Comments

Hello everyone! You can now comment on notes, photos and checkins. There are more commenting features coming soon but in the interim we wanted to release the basics.

brightkite-comments

New Blog Widgets & Plugins

We are starting to see some great contributions emerge from the community of Brightkite users. We recently discovered these two:

Brightkite Blog Sidebar Widget
Kevin Hoyt built a neat flash based sidebar widget.

Brightkite Blog Sidebar Widget

Brightkite Plugin for WordPress
Richard John wrote a Brightkite plugin for WordPress. Currently it will display your latest checkins, photos, and notes.
Brightkite WordPress

Brightkite Widgets Are No Longer a Pipe Dream

Joe Lazarus made a Brightkite Badge Widget using Yahoo Pipes. This easily configurable widget can be placed on your blog or web page and it will show your recent notes and photo posts.

We do have official Brightkite widgets in the works but meantime this is a great interim option. Thanks Joe!

brightkite widget

Street View

You can now see places from street level if Google has “crawled” the street.

Brightkite Google Street View

Brightkite KML Support and Google Earth Visualizations

We recently added KML support to every Brightkite place page. To find it, just replace the .rss with .kml on the place page RSS feed.

For example: http://brightkite.com/places/77de68daecd823babbb58edb1c8e14d7106e83bb/objects.kml

Over the past few days we have been having a lot of fun visualizing live Brightkite activity by plugging network KML files into Google Earth.

You can visualize Brightkite place feeds in Google Earth as well, here’s how:

Download the following Brighkite Universe KML network file and open it in Google Earth:
brightkite_universe.kml

Here is another example showing activity from the Colorado place page:
brightkite_colorado.kml

We recommend only viewing one network feed at a time and changing your Google Earth “Fly Speed” to around 1.3.

We Have Support on Mars?

phoenix brightkite

We found this at Patchchord.com