The Past: Remember when you sent out that text to a few friends to go to a show and then the responses trickled in one at a time and you found yourself coordinating when and who could meet where and then what to do to… all while you were trying to get your laundry done, go to the bank, and walk the dog beforehand?

The Present... from your friends at Brightkite: Now you can organize plans with several friends at the same time without being left to coordinate back and forth for them. And you can do it anywhere in the Universe, except a lot of places, but if you are seeing this – you have the power!

How does Group Text work?
We’ve revamped our direct messaging infrastructure to allow for multi-friend conversations and the ability to “reply-to-all’, similar to email. Now your friends, depending on their settings, will receive your messages via text, push-notification, mobile web, or web. When anyone in the group replies, everyone in the conversation will get the message….similar to a giant group hug.

You can leave and create groups on the fly (up to 25 people) making it easy to ping them about a meet up, introduce people to each other or just carry on a group conversation.

The best part is it’s free, so those of you running short on your monthly text messages, iPhone and iPod Touch owners, or mobile web users can save on unlimited texts to individuals or groups.

Chat with anyone
Group Text works with anyone. You can invite anyone from your phone address book, your Brightkite friends or just add a mobile phone number. You and your friends can use Group Text anywhere in the world. Your friends don’t need to join Brightkite to take part in your conversations – they just reply to the message and jump right in.

Send Photos and Locations
Here’s something else really useful: Group Text also allows you to send photos and locations to the group. You can send your location and attach a photo for each message. Now your friends don’t have to constantly ask, “Where are you?” or “What do you look like?”.

Use it on the Web

Create groups, send messages, photos and locations from any browser. The web also holds a complete history of all your messages, so you can cringe at all that nonsense you said last night.

Get it on the iPhone
We’ve created a Group Text optimized version of the Brightkite app, its been submitted and is in Apple’s hands now. The next release of the standard Brightkite app will have the Group Text features as well.

Use it via Text Messaging
We’ve worked with most of the carriers in the US to get these neat little things called ’shortcode extentions’. This adds three extra numbers to our 41414 shortcode, which allows you to run up to 100 threaded conversations using text messaging. At the moment this is only available to our US customers. Give it a shot.

That’s it – take Group Text for a spin and tell us what you think.

Posted by Brady Becker at 5:38 PM in Product 33894 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2010/03/11/brightkite-group-text/New%21+Brightkite+Group+Text2010-03-12+00%3A38%3A25Brady+Becker

You might have noticed the new Brightkite app quietly appearing in your updates over the weekend… or perhaps you ran across this article, or this one; either way, Brightkite 2.0 for iPhone is now officially here.

This update brings the 2.0 feature set to your iPhone. Download the update here.

So what’s new in the 2.0-ized iPhone app?

Choose your audience, each time you post
Similar to the web, we’ve redesigned the sharing options to offer more freedom around the simple yet powerful privacy model. With one tap you can share with friends or everyone and, if you choose, syndicate to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Additionally we’ve added the ability to post with no location at all.

Home view dashboard
The new home view allows you to see what’s going on at a glance. It displays your current status, what your friends are up to, and allows you to quickly post or check in. Keep an eye on this section of the app over the next few weeks.

New friend model & filters
We’ve updated the app’s UI to accomodate the 2.0 friend/fans model already live on the web. You can easily see activity from your friends, your fans, or everyone.

“Much like in the real world, “friends” are two people who mutually follow each other, while “fans” are people who follow you, but for whatever reason, you do not (yet?) follow back. With this straightforward and more realistic system, you can either share your location check-in activity with the world (including fans), or only with friends, which will prevent both the public, non-Brightkite users, as well as Brightkite users who are fans, from seeing anything.” – Macworld

Snazzy design updates
In addition to the changes above, we’ve updated the design to give you simple-yet-powerful control over your activity and privacy.

Let us know what you think of the updates.

Posted by Brady Becker at 7:29 PM in Product 25102 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/27/brightkite-iphone-v2/iPhone+update%3A+2.0+is+in+the+App+Store2009-10-28+02%3A29%3A49Brady+Becker

It’s been a few days; we’ve added a few more features and ironed out a lot of kinks. We asked you to take part in a survey to tell us what you thought of Brightkite 2.0 and many of you have (thank you!). We thought it was only fair to share some of the results so far. The chart shows the percentage of users who like and dislike some of the new features of Brightkite (we’ve taken out the people who were undecided).

What does this mean? Generally it looks like most of you like most of the changes. However, we clearly got some things more right than others. The ability to set privacy and sharing with each post is your favorite development, but clearly the new UI and the new Friend/Fan Model still needs work. We hear you!

Your written comments in the survey were also very telling. Here are a few examples:

What do you like?

“Overall slickness – I love the new clean look, the bar at the bottom, the filtering options and the like/dislike”

What do you hate?

“Removing option for trusted friends. I can no longer provide precise location to appropriate friends”

What do you miss?

“Map view of visited places”

What do you want us to add?

“Games! Introduce challenges. Let me compete against friends.”

“I would like to see Brightkite auto-refresh the way Friend feed does.”

“Video clips and/or audio clips”

“It would be killer if Brightkite figured out where I was, and based on my patterns in the past texted me a list of the 3 most likely places I would want to check in at.”

These are just some of thousands of comments. The survey is still open, so if you haven’t taken it, we’d love to hear what you have to tell us. We sadly can’t keep everyone happy, or build everything at once, but we do want to listen and focus on the things that are most important to you. Thanks once again for all your help.

Posted by lanky at 4:47 AM in Product 243714 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/15/survey-says/Survey+Says...2009-10-15+11%3A47%3A49lanky

Well… Over the past few days we’ve been caught in an avalanche of data importing, exporting, reloading, wrapping, unwrapping, hijinxing and rethinking… you name it. In the process of squeezing Brightkite 1.0 through the flux capacitor we learned humbling lessons in what can go wrong. We understand some of you are frustrated and we apologize. For everyone else, thanks for having patience and faith, 2.0 is back up.

So we’ve already proven we’re not perfect (there we said it) and moving forward there will be some minor bugs that we’ll address (as quickly as we can). As for the major issues that brought the maintenance screen abruptly back up, those have been solved.

We are working on a range of known issues – here are some of the first one’s you’ll see fixed:

- Mobile web enhancements
- Email fixes
- Ability to track and untrack threads of comments
- Inviting new friends
- Maps
- Editing Favorite Places (formerly Placemarks)

Please have a look round the new service, and then tell us what you think – both good and bad. If you have comments or ideas, then post them here.

Yours humbly,

The Brightkite team

Posted by Brady Becker at 11:22 AM in Product 239125 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/09/hello-is-this-thing-on/Hello%2A+is+this+thing+on%3F2009-10-09+18%3A22%3A54Brady+Becker

Today we’re excited to announce the shiny new Brightkite. First off we want to apologize for downtime associated with this update, there were some major changes under the hood that required us to be offline, this won’t happen with subsequent releases. Thank you for your patience.

So, it’s been months in the making, we’ve had countless bleary-eyed nights, but Brightkite 2.0 is now here. Brightkite’s design and technology have been re-built and re-envisioned, practically from the ground up. We have a vision for the future, and 2.0 is the beginning and foundation to get us there. The next chapter in Brightkite will be an exciting one and we need your help. Give us your suggestions, tell us your pain points (we do listen), and together we will continue to build awesome things.

In addition to the unseen upgrades under the hood, 2.0 includes many new features that you can see. Here’s some of what’s new:

Pick Your Friends, Gain Your Fans
Since one of our goals is to enable face-time over screen-time, we’ve redesigned Brightkite friendships to resemble those in the real-world. In 2.0 people can “subscribe” to your public posts by becoming a fan, but only you decide who’s a friend. Just like the real world, friends may see posts that fans can’t and can have privileges that fans don’t. This new asymmetrical model takes the pressure off of having to accept friend requests from people who are not really friends.

Privacy Settings for the Real World
We’ve redesigned the sharing options for simple yet powerful privacy. With one click you can share with friends and/or everyone. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to share with Twitter & Facebook on an individual post basis, and the capability to post with no location at all.

Streams to Order
We’ve redesigned streams for the ultimate exploring experience. We’ve added filters and search boxes that allow customization of the people, locations, and type of posts you want to see, all on the fly. Take for example: Martinis in San Francisco, Food in Japan or Unicorns Everywhere.

Stats
Stats are the beginning of wave of neat features we have planned around places and profiles. At a glance you can see number of views on your posts, popularity of a given post, visitors to a place, etc…

PlaceSnapping™ Enhancements
PlaceSnapping™, a favorite feature you’re all familiar with from v1, is now much more place-snappier. We’ve enhanced the underlying technology and are actively tweaking it to match the places you go. The more you use it the better it gets, reducing the time it takes to make a post, allowing more fun with your friends rather than your handset.

2.0 iPhone App, awaiting approval from Apple
The app has been submitted and is waiting approval. It’s in Apple’s hands now but in the meantime we’ve posted some screenshots. The app should appear within a week or two but anything changes, we will let you know.

Below is a list of other notable features and improvements in 2.0. Better yet, discover them for yourself.

Notable 2.0 improvements:
- Live stream updates
- Updated Public API
- Ability to rate posts (thumbs up/thumbs down)
- Favorite Places (used to be Placemarks)
- New user and place statistics
- Updated mobile site: m.brightkite.com
- Persistent location bar
- Improved posting flow
- New UI design
- Improved scalability
- Various SMS improvements
- AJAX improvements
- Bunches and bunches o’ other fixes

Posted by Brady Becker at 7:06 AM in Product 216241 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/06/its-here-brightkite-2-0/It%27s+here%3A+Brightkite+2.0%212009-10-06+14%3A06%3A11Brady+Becker

We are working on Brightkite today which will result in some periods of downtime for the service across the web and all mobile applications. We will do our best to keep this inconvenience to a minimum.

Thanks for your patience.

- The Brightkite Team

Posted by lanky at 6:33 AM in Product 227328 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/05/we-are-working-on-brighkite-2-0/We+are+working+on+Brightkite+2.02009-10-05+13%3A33%3A51lanky

We told you there was a new Brightkite coming and we have completed the first phase. To give you a glimpse of what to expect, some of the coming improvements include enhancements to Placesnapping©; the ability for Brightkite to find the place where you are and specifically to do so, more quickly and more easily. These improvements required a significant hardware and database upgrade which we accomplished last night, hence the service interruption.

This gives us the foundation to release the cool new user-facing features, which we hope you will find as exciting as we do. We intend to make the shiny new Brightkite available next week.

The Brightkite team.

Posted by lanky at 8:41 AM in Product 22579 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/10/01/2-0-update/2.0+update2009-10-01+15%3A41%3A48lanky

Howdy gang.

Wanted to let you know some big changes are in the works at Brightkite. We’ve been fast at work on some big upgrades and are preparing to flip the switch on something brand new. The forthcoming 2.0 release includes a plethora of new and improved features (many based on feedback from you!). Stay tuned, be forewarned, changes are a comin…

- The Brightkite Team

Posted by Brady Becker at 4:11 PM in Product 213037 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/09/25/changes-are-a-comin/Changes+are+a+comin%27...+%3A%292009-09-25+23%3A11%3A02Brady+Becker

Brightkite already lets you see what your friends are doing in two dimensions – in a customizable real-time stream and in a map view. We’ve now partnered with Layar to add a third dimension. Using the Layar Augmented Reality Browser, you can now look at the world around you through your phone’s camera, and see your friends’ posts, photos and locations superimposed exactly where they were made. As you turn the phone around, you see the posts to each side and behind you.

Want to know where everyone is? Just point your camera at the world and see who’s where.

Want to know what people thought of the bar in front of you? Just point your phone at it, and see the comments and photos people have left in the past.

Can’t remember which restaurant you liked last time? Just point your phone and see what you said about each.

Don’t believe us? Check out the video, or get out your android phone and give it a try.

Alice laughed, “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Brightkite Augmented Reality from Brightkite on Vimeo.

Posted by Brady Becker at 7:03 AM in Android, Product 19637 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/08/17/brightkite-layar-take-you-through-the-looking-glass-to-see-your-friends-in-a-new-dimension/Brightkite+%26+Layar+take+you+through+the+looking+glass+to+see+your+friends+in+a+new+dimension.+2009-08-17+14%3A03%3A40Brady+Becker

Attention Brightkiters, you may have already noticed that you’re receiving SMS notifications from 41414 instead of 80289, this is because we are switching our US short code to 41414. We love paying attention to detail and we felt that our current short code was too complicated. This new number should be a little easier to remember and key in on your phone.

The short code is the only thing that’s changing, all of the SMS commands will remain the same, as will SMS notifications. 80289 will still work for the time being, but in the near future it will point you to 41414, so be sure to update your address books.  We have thoroughly tested this new short code for any bugs, but if you experience any problems (hey, it happens!) please email support[at]brightkite.com.

…and yes, Brightkite’s 41414 may be similar to Twitter’s 40404, but it’s just 1 better. :)

Posted by Lesley Yarbrough at 3:50 PM in Mobile, Product 18482 commentshttp://blog.brightkite.com/2009/07/30/brightkite-short-code-has-changed-to-41414/Brightkite+short+code+has+changed+to+414142009-07-30+22%3A50%3A55Lesley+Yarbrough