We found this at Patchchord.com
Archive for the 'Placestreaming' Category
…Why not make friends where you are? With Brightkite you can.
Some years don’t take up much space in my mind (1983,1988,1993) while other years instantly bring back rich memories (1995, 2001, 2007). This year — in all it’s stress and beauty — will be remembered clearly forever. That’s something special. Even letting my imagination muse freely on the worst of the worsts and the best of the bests, I’d have a hard time picturing a year with more of both in it. The team at Brightkite is grateful to all of you who have helped us over the past year bring Brightkite from vision to working product.
We acknowledge it’s been a while since our last post. The reason is we have been working so feverously that the blog has suffered some neglect. So for an update, work on the product continues unabated and we are nearing a public release. Additionally we have some exciting developments that we will be able to announce at the beginning of the year.
In the mean time check out my Brightkite GeoRSS, or view my feed chronologically. GeoRSS is one small feature of Brightkite. You can see where I am and what I’m doing as we roll into 2008. Have a wonderful New Year whatever location you are at.
If you haven’t been keeping up on the previous posts below is a quick recap of what Brightkite is.
During 2007 we finally saw some real value in having lots of “friends” thru online services (as summarized here). During the course of 2008 Brightkite is aiming to create real value among your “real world friends”. Brightkite is a next-generation location-based social network. In real-time it lets people see where their friends are, share their experiences and make new friends based on the places that they frequent. Businesses and venues can capture and syndicate the activity around them via their website, in venue screens and RSS. Brightkite can be used via the web, text messaging, e-mail, WAP, and the iPhone, giving users a truly immersive experience.
Presently Brightkite is open to a small community of users. We are finalizing all the moving parts and anticipate a public release early in the year. We expect 2008 to be great year for “real world friends”. Sign up for our beta here.
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.
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.