flying my brightkite, tickling my twitter

So, I’m diving into what I think is one of the most exhibitionist of the social networking sites that I’ve seen, brightkite, today so I figured I’d blog about the experience.

The end goal hear is to update my status from one place:
brightkite -> twitter -> facebook

I think brightkite is kinda cool, I’m just curious if it is going to achieve the goal of actually bringing people together who just ‘happen to be around’ each other.

(general note:  All toghether, I spent about an hour-and change getting this all set up.  That’s not actually too bad, considering I did a lot of tweaking around on the the brightkite privacy settings…)

 

brightkite: brightkite.com/people/k_bear

Concept: From the website:

Location-based social networking.  Discover who visits your favorite places. Join the community in real time. 
Track your friends.  See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time. 
Meet people around you.  Meet real world friends. Reveal your location, befriend, and chat with people around you

Setup:

1. Registration is pretty simple.  Set up your mobile phone, give it some info, and you’re on your way.
2. Privacy:  They make the privacy setup somewhat confusing.  I know that my posts and my location will only be detailed at the ‘city’ level (i.e. people will only know that I’m in “Seattle” unless they’re a trusted friend), but I don’t know if that is going to limit the feature of finding out what’s going on near me.  If it does, this is going to be a little pointless, since the entire point is to find out what people are doing around in your very-local vicinity.
3. Adding Friends: I found this to be hard.  I know of two people who use brightkite, but there was no way for me to search for them via email or their login name.  I had to find link directly to one of there posts from Facebook so that I could find their profile, which was really weak.  The only way brightkite lets you find people is through people that you’re following on Twitter, which was very annoying.  Let me email search, at least!
4. Posting on Twitter: one of the reasons I wanted to start using brightkite was so I could post in one place and have it update twitter & facebook.  Getting this setup was a breeze… now I need to get twitter to start updating facebook.

Experience:

I’m going to be brightkiting today for the first time as I go enjoy a beautiful Seattle day.  We’ll see what I think.

My only major concern is privacy.  I’m a little concerned about this one, because I don’t want to advertise to the world that I’m at at exact location X.  I mean, after all, social and location based social networking might be really cool, but it loses some appeal when it can be used as a tool to know when to steal things off my desk or, worse, from my house.

 

Twitter: twiter.com/k_bear

Concept: it’s blogging-lite, and I know I’m late to the game on this one… apparently the whole world has started twittering before I even heard of it. ^_^  Another way to look at Twitter is as facebook updates on steroids.

Setup:  Super easy.  Set up a profile, let it look up your contacts, and you’re on your way.  The only annoying thing is that it won’t import contacts from Outlook, which is where I keep all of my data, so I’ll have to do some manual entry. 

Getting Facebook to play with Twitter:  This wasn’t too bad.  You have to set up this Facebook app to do it.  It’s easy though, you just add the app and point it to your tweets.  To make it work, though, you have to click the huge link on the Facebook Twitter application page after you install it that I looked for for about 5-min that says “Want Twitter to update your Facebook status?”

Experience:  It’s alright.  It’s a mini-blog in my mind.  I’m primarily planning on keeping it updated via Brightkite and using it to follow a few of my friends who tweet instead of blog.

 

The rest of my day…

…can now be logged from my mobile phone so that… um, yah, why am I doing this again?  Oh, yah, because I’m a geek. ^_^