All these “Face-Space” online social friend semantics have me confused and depressed. Are you really my friend? This is an annoyance that has plagued online social networks for sometime. My social network profiles are junked up with friends I’ll never have the opportunity to meet in real life. Out of my 300 or so online “friends” it can be whittled down to 2 dozen that I might see on a regular basis. So really I only have 2 dozen friends. A blow to my ego when put in those terms. That said, I am not very interested in “socializing” with people that I’ll never have the chance to meet in person. Additionally I’m not sure if I could deal emotionally if this happened again. 
Wouldn’t it be nice to have social community around the locations you frequent? To actually meet new people, not Facebook-to-Myspace, but face-to-face? MySpace has done a really good job of facilitating meaningless cyber friendships with unprecedented ease. Ironically, Facebook does not easily enable face-time with friends at all. At Brightkite we believe tangible community has a place around real-world locations.
Brightkite is a mobile location-based social network. Built on our Location Platform, Brightkite enables people to connect with the communities surrounding physical locations. By empowering people with a mobile profile, Brightkite enables location-based community and friendships to exist on the fly. Discover and explore social communities around your favorite venue, restaurant, park etc… Explore who is there, who was there, what they are saying, photos are posting, etc. Brightkite is creating mobile social communities based on where you are, and who you are.
If you would like an invite to start using Brightkite please sign up here.
Wow, we had a great time at the Denver Museum of Art on Friday night. We projected a Brightkite Satellite screen on a wall and watched people stop and interact with it while they were walking to and from other exhibits. We posted different questions throughout the night to get responses from people (i.e. “what’s your favorite nighttime spot in Denver?”, “what’s your favorite quote?” and even “what was the best day of your life?”). Several people stayed for a while and sent in many different messages. People really understood the concept of “checking in” at a physical location. We explained that the website would show their exact location on a map and that it would let them see every message that was posted from this location. (A concept we call Placestreaming or Placecasting).
We’ll be back at the museum next month so if you’re in the Denver area be sure to stop by the next Untitled event. Over the next couple weeks we’ll be doing this at a couple different events. We’ll write about them as they happen. In the meantime take a look at some of the pictures from the event. And keep reading below for some exciting news.
Here I am getting feedback from people using the service.
The interior architecture of the museum is just as impressive as the exterior.
In other news we’re happy to announce that we’ve hired the lead developer from Socialthing! We’re very lucky to have him as part of our team but he’s twice as lucky to be on ours. Brady, one of our founders, had to negotiate with Ben for a while to make it happen. Take a look at the pictures below. Ben is a fierce negotiator. He kept holding out for a company car and a 4-10 workweek. Brady worked his magic though and Ben eventually settled for no pay as well as a no say whatsoever on product direction decisions.
Welcome aboard Ben!……
Brady locks in the deal… sweet!
Update: We were obviously joking about Ben. He’s got plenty of work over at socialthing!
Tomorrow night our service will be a featured evening exhibit at the Denver Art Museum! They’ll be displaying a large projected Brightkite Satellite during their monthly Untitled series event. The Brightkite Satellite will display messages sent from users who are “checked in” at the Museum. We’ll have instructions telling people how they can check in and how they can post messages.
This officially marks our first client for Brightkite so we’re very excited. A few of us are planning to go over there tomorrow night to get feedback from people using it. If you’re in the Denver/Boulder area you should swing by and check it out. The event runs from 6pm to 10pm on Friday July 27th. If you haven’t been to the museum then you’ve got to come. The Architecture is breathtaking and the exhibits are pretty good too. My favorite is the temporary exhibit called Radar.
We’ll be posting pictures from the event on this blog.
The museum is located here.
Placestreaming, as in the stream of content originating from a specific place. We think this really captures what Brightkite is all about. We enable location based conversations. And location based conversations, in aggregate, are placestreams.
The excitement of the iPhone brought about an activity Techcrunch called Evenstreaming. Arrington coined the term when he talked about how Robert Scoble and several others basically broadcasted themselves sitting in line overnight waiting to buy the iPhone, the most highly anticipated technology release in history. Arrington called Evenstreaming “the seed of a revolution” and “the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television”.
Just before Evenstreaming, people were talking a lot about Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming being the stream of content published by someone about themselves. Twitter, Jaiku, Blogs, Tumblr and these live video tools let people stream themselves.
But we’re really excited about Placestreaming. We’re all about places and we want to let people share what they have to say when they’re in specific locations. If you think about it, events happen in places. Our lives happen in places. The place oftentimes dictates our experience there to a large extent. The place is relevant to how people interact when they’re there.
So Brightkite lets lets you stream from a place, or about a place. You can do this when you’re there or when you’re at home on your computer. When other people are in that place, they can read what people have streamed from that location - this is when it gets fun. People begin to communicate in a new way, and new connections are made that might never have been made before. Social Placestreaming emerges.
Stay tuned for more.
I like reading things like this over at 37 Signals that make me think about the impact of technology on our culture. Matt comments on a new book by Andrew Keen titled The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. Matt gives a few specific examples from the book then goes on to say that Keen is kind of overreacting.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We really want to change the way people communicate with each other and how they engage with ideas when in physical locations. Is that just more useless noise or does it actually add something meaningful to our culture? I don’t know, but I think successful ideas are concepts that are well aligned with a momentum of change in our society. Whether they create something good for humanity vs just extra noise is up to the individuals using the technology. Personally, I have a lot of faith that there are always creative and talented people that use technology in positive ways that add to our understanding of humanity.
Oh, I also really like this statement of Matt’s: “commenting on the news is a lot different than discovering it, we all suffer when reporting disappears”
I’m definitely commenting here…
Last thing; another piece about usefulness vs meaningfulness talking about Twitter on Wired. Wired says Twitter creates a kind of sixth sense… Very interesting…
Wow, what a month. We can’t believe June is almost over. It’s been a pretty incredible month here at TechStars. Sometimes I think the best way to describe TechStars is that it’s like finals week but for a whole summer. Everyone’s cranking away 24-7 on building their products, meeting with mentors, getting feedback and refining their vision. The major difference of course is that this is REAL and everything’s on the line.
This is really an amazing time for us. For those of you haven’t checked in on TechStars I really recommend you check out techstars.tv and the TechStars Network blog - a collection of blogs by TechStars teams and mentors.
Finally, our motto of the week is: physical locations, virtual communities.
What’s that make you think of?
Since posting the invite page for our upcoming beta, we’ve had a lot of people sign up. Today, we ran some of the numbers to find out which method of notification is preferred, and came up with the following results:
As expected, email is the most popular method of notification for the invites, but interestingly enough a lot of people opted to be invited via instant messenger. We suspect that is mostly because of the lack of good, reliable instant messenger notification across the different providers, and people just want to see if it works. It’ll be interesting to watch as this develops.
Looks like the good folks over at 37signals like our placeholder page for Brightkite 
From their site:
Came across this ‘we’ll let you know when it launches’ screen (at brightkite), which is a little bit out of the ordinary. It lets you get notified not only via email, but also via IM and SMS. Pretty neat, given that the product they’re promoting is about notifications.
As avid fans of their stuff (RoR, Basecamp, Campfire, Getting Real, etc.), we’re quite honored by this mention. Thank You, Matt!
The results are in, and Brightkite was among the 10 companies still left standing at the end of the TechStars selection process. We are proud to have made it this far (after all, there were over 300 applications), and really look forward to the sessions and mentorship that the program will provide.
Despite the excitement over getting accepted, we still have a ton of work ahead of us. Over the next few months, we will blog about Brightkite’s progress, talk about day-to-day life as a TechStars participant, and give you some exclusive sneak previews of what to expect (hint: subscribe to our RSS feed).
