Thanks for your post. As one of the founders of Brightkite, I thought I’d chime in and offer my perspective. The points that you make are valid, and I’d like to address some of them below:

- Concerning privacy, you have a lot of control over who gets to see your location/content. Once of the reasons for building Brightkite is that we noticed a lot of people disclosing their location on Twitter, which has very limited privacy controls. We wanted to give users more fine-grained control.

Also, remember that checking in is a manual process (so you are not being tracked at all), and we designed it that way on purpose; you decide when, where and how often you check in, and how accurate you want to be.

- Concerning value: The main purpose of Brightkite isn’t really to tell people where you are at; it is to connect you with people around you. Some of the primary use cases are at conferences, concerts, etc. You can see the digital identities of the people who are around you, and then contact them via a double-blind messaging system.

- Concerning friend selectivity, we’re with you. The concept of friend doesn’t have much meaning anymore with most social networking sites. We’ve introduced another level of friendship which we call “trusted”. Analogous to the real world, these are your real friends, whereas regular friendships can be used for acquaintances.

- Concerning usability, we’re very well aware that we can make things easier, and we’re working on it (hence the private beta…don’t expect everything to be 100%)

All that being said, the service obviously isn’t for everybody, and that’s totally fine. If it doesn’t add any value to you, then by all means, don’t use it. A lot of people however do find it useful in some shape or form, which compels us to keep working on it.

Thanks,
Martin May
Founder, brightkite.com

I have discovered maybe one person near me, but yeah, my usage is falling off because I’m taking ownership of how much signal and noise I produce.

I do check in, not with my exact location, but with the zipcode in this one-zipcode town, and that puts me in the middle of a lake. Heh.

BTW, my wife, who is more than capable of figuring it out, hasn’t bothered checking in because well, when she’s out and about, she has stuff to do.

I know it doesn’t seem that important but I have made a few friends from BK, that I follow on Twitter.

The ideal thing would be if your Cell Phone GPSd your location to BK at the push of a button. Imagine being in Vegas for one of those things, and click, wow I’m in the same bar with Dvorak. now what corner is he hiding in?

Ok maybe that’s not who you’d follow or want to know where he is. But on the other hand, maybe….

30/40 something year old men like you and I have no use for these types of things really than the novelty. 12-17 year old kids do.

I think location notification will be something that gets more popular and widely used in the near future. Look at what they are doing with the iPhone… friends can be stalkers too!!

And having been stalked in real life twice, once surviving because the gun near-miraculously jammed, I don’t put my full address there – nor do I seem to be able to remember to check into any place so much as check out of. More like the “oh yeah, um, I’m leaving the library” effect.

I’m certainly not its target user – but I can see where if I had salesguys in the field it could be a fabulous app.

Other than that, it has been a big fat goose egg. And this is from someone who is giving it a real college try.

I jumped on the BrightKite bandwagon about a week ago wanting to know what all the fuss was about. Though I’ve gone all sorts of different places, I think I’ve actually only updated twice. First, like you, I don’t think a lot of people would &*care* where I was at any given moment in time and, secondly, I don’t really want random strangers knowing my exact location all the time.

I can see some use in BrightKite but more as a precursor to more advanced mobile device based services than a stand alone text based interface. I can see something like this being paired with a program sitting on a GPS enabled phone that automatically updates say every 30 minutes. While it’d be spooky, I could also see it being sort of useful. That’s another thing I don’t like about BrightKite – it isn’t convenient enough to use. I have to *remember* to update and that isn’t always an easy thing to do.

So, while I can see the potential usefulness of BrightKite and services like it, I don’t think you’ll ever see me update that often. It just doesn’t offer enough value as opposed to the work I need to do to use it or the “creepy factor” it brings.

Judging things without trying isn’t really good practice.