Archive for the 'Twitter' Category

New Features: Customize your Tweets & Master Switch for Notifications

Published by Brady Becker on June 30, 2008 in Product and Twitter.

Over the weekend we added some subtle new features.

Master Switch for Notifications
We have added a master switch that will turn off/on all SMS and email notifications.

To turn off/on all your notifications:

  1. Go to Account Settings and click your Notifications tab.
  2. Next adjust the master switches at the top of the page as desired.
  3. Click Save.

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Customize What You Send to Twitter
By popular request you can now customize what you send to Twitter from Brightkite.

To customize your Tweets:

  1. Go to Account Settings and click on the Sharing tab.
  2. Scroll down and click the customize link located next to the Twitter posting option.
  3. Enter the variables of the stuff you would like to send to Twitter
  4. Click submit.
  5. When you are done with your customization click save.

Custom Brightkite Twitter Window

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New Features: GeoRSS, Around Me Radius, Nearby Notifications and more…

Published by Brady Becker on May 2, 2008 in Brightkite, Product and Twitter.

Over the past two weeks we have added a handful of new features and improvements. Many of these have been a direct result of the great user feedback we have been receiving. Your feedback has been improving the product (we hope), so keep it coming; we are listening!

Below are a few of the new features we have added:

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Brightkite GeoRSS Feeds
Place streams, user streams, and the Brightkite Universe stream now have GeoRSS feeds. The “Around Me” feed is coming soon.

Here is an example of my Brightkite GeoRSS feed:
http://brightkite.com/people/brady/objects.rss

Now here is a user feed if you only want to see only a user’s photos and notes:
http://brightkite.com/people/hiro/objects.rss?limit=100&filters=text,photos

Here is an example of a Brightkite place feed:
http://brightkite.com/places/356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab/objects.rss

If you throw your GeoRSS feed into the search box on Google Maps you’ll get markers for each post and checkin on the map. Look at this Google Maps example, or view your Brightkite GeoRSS chronologically. These are just a few examples of what you can do with Brightkite GeoRSS. We are excited about the many interesting possibilities around visualizing Brightkite GeoRSS feeds.

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Business & People Search
You can now search Brightkite users by username or real name. Brightkite business search allows you to browse and check in at businesses.

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Around Me Radius
You can now configure the radius of your “Around Me” stream. See activity around your location at varying degrees of accuracy.

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Nearby Notifications
You can now set the radius of your nearby notifications, choose friends only or turn them off completely.

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Twitter Geolocation
With Twitter sharing enabled, your Brightkite location can now update the location in your Twitter profile rather than potentially annoying your followers with constant check in updates.

Keep watch this week for the iPhone application and more details on the developer API.

As you can see we have been really busy and could use some help. Come work with us! We are hiring a Rails Developer, Flash/Flex Developer and Product Evangelist.

Brightkite hands out some beta invites

Published by Brady Becker on April 14, 2008 in Brightkite, Product and Twitter.

Today we began handing out the first private beta accounts off of our invite list. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Brightkite is a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. Depending on a user’s privacy setting they can also be open to meeting others nearby.

Brightkite has been designed from the ground up to be accessible to everyone regardless of carrier or how fancy your phone is. Currently there are a handful of location-based social networks that exist within the walled gardens of carriers or courtyards of the fancy iPhone. How fun is a social network when only a small percentage of your friends (and potential friends) can use it? Brightkite has been designed to be device & carrier agnostic. Although rich media devices such as iPhone obviously offer a better user experience, at the lowest level you can interact with Brightkite via text message (SMS), web and iPhone.

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SMS Interface - Although these text messages are shown on a fancy phone, you can interact with Brightkite on any phone via text message (SMS).

If you are waiting for an invite we hope it arrives soon. You can also get in by finding a friend with an invite. Once you’re in, so are your friends. In the meantime, below are some select screen shots of the live Brightkite beta web interface:

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Around Me - View users nearby your current location. See what they are up to. Make new friends.

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Brightkite Universe - View all the public activity on Brightkite. Notice the posts from the Maldives; the service is not limited to the US.

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Live Friends Map - See where your friends are at a neighborhood, city, state and world zoom level.

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Place Pages - See who visits your favorite places and what they post there, in real-time.

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Visited Places - Keep track of all the places you go.

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Sharing - Brightkite can share your content with Twitter & Fire Eagle

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Brightkite iPhone Application - The Brightkite iPhone application is coming very soon.

How Should Notifications Work?

Published by Martin on May 1, 2007 in Brightkite and Twitter. 5 Comments

One of our blog readers, Lisa Amorao, has posted a blog entry discussing some of the shortcomings of existing notification services, why they don’t work very well for her, and what she’d like to see in Brightkite.

An excerpt:

For the last couple of months I’ve been searching for ways to send out notifications to reach massive amounts of people. Here are factors that I have to consider.

1) I want mobile options. Because not everyone will be in front of the computer at the time I want to reach them, but almost everyone has his/her cell phone in his pocket.

2) While most are familiar with the wonders of the web, I still have to think of the handful of my intended recipients who may still be living in the world of Internet 1.0.

3) I am looking to notify several hundred people at a time. With that in mind, I don’t have the resources to explain things (sign up, how it works, etc) to each one. So it has to be simple enough that even the old school users will get it right away.

4) My intended recipients are more of the LinkedIn crowd as opposed to the MySpace crowd.

Lisa, we’re listening, and hope that Brightkite will address most of the issues you’ve been having with other services. We also have a few aces up our sleeve that we think you’ll like. In the spirit of your post, we’d like to hear from other readers how they think notifications should work. What features do you care about? How do you want to use such a service? Please tell us either by commenting on this post, or by sending us an e-mail.