Saturday, June 7, 2008

brightkite.com

Andrew suggested that we try Brightkite. It's a location based mobile social networking app. It does a good job of doing what others do, letting you "check-in" at different locations and then make notes about each location. Checking in lets your friends track you; and you can see where your friends are.

Unfortunately, all these sites still suffer from the problem of figuring out what "your location" means. Pretty much the only thing I can match on is an address (although once I do that, I can give it a shorthand name) and I just don't know the address (or fancy spelling) of places like University Towne Centre [sic].

The problem of figuring out what "place" means to a user is gonna get solved ... it just hasn't yet. (And GPS is not a solution in itself.)

1 comment:

KDoel said...

You might be interested in trying Electric Pocket's free FindMe app for Facebook and smartphones (BlackBerry and Windows Mobile).

www.electricpocket.com/findme

You can use it to tag your common locations and it will publish that location to your Facebook profile when you arrive there (unless you prefer to "go dark.").

Give it a try.