Keep tabs on Brightkite, the location-based social network
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.
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.
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.
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 Plugin for WordPress
Richard John wrote a Brightkite plugin for WordPress. Currently it will display your latest checkins, photos, and notes.
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!
You can now see places from street level if Google has “crawled” the street.
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 found this at Patchchord.com
Yesterday evening we quietly released a generic mobile version of Brightkite. Cheers to Tony for whipping out this alpha version in a couple days. We haven’t yet tested it on every device so if you encounter issues on certain devices, please tell us, and specify the device.
You can find the mobile version of Brightkite at m.brightkite.com
In addition to the mobile version, we have been working away fixing some of the major issues discovered in the past few weeks. Things to look for in the coming weeks: improved mapping functionality, improved friend discovery, improved profiles, refinements to the iPhone app, and fixes to many other little issues such as the login cookie annoyance.
This afternoon we released an alpha version of the Brightkite iPhone application. To use it, just visit Brightkite.com on your iPhone.
There are some features missing and it’s possible some things are broken, but hey, it’s alpha. Let us know what you think here, we are listening.
