Dinner and Bar-hopping with Brightkite
I got my invite to Brightkite about a week ago, I’m still not sure how useful it is. The user base is too small yet, (but it’s growing) in my neck of the woods.
Brightkite thumbnail: you share your current location (to a level of accuracy that you control) with friends and others; you can create notes, ala twitter, and you can upload photos from your computer or phone. It might be a fun way to find out where your friends are (remember Dodgeball?) so you can meet up with them. More about how it works here.
I do know one thing: it’s fun on a Friday or Saturday night.
Last Friday night, we got home from early dinner around 8:30pm. I opened Brightkite and clicked on the Brightkite Universe tab. That opens the spigot so you can see everything flowing through the system. What’s happening at 8:30pm on a Friday night? In the eastern and central time zones, people are out having drinks with friends and eating food. I spent several minutes thumbing through pictures of food from restaurants around the country, taken moments before and uploaded by Brightkite.
Yes, only a foodie could find that interesting. But there was also something intangibly enjoyable about being able to look in the fun others were having at that very moment, from late night clubbing in Europe to happy hour on the west coast. I saw restaurants where we’d eaten, and city scenes we’d experienced first-hand. It was tremendous fun. And I had contributed my pictures, too.
I can’t be in San Francisco or Montreal every weekend, but the vicarious experience filled a little of that void. It’s like subscribing to a Flickr tag for a city you enjoy and watching life there from day to day; Brightkite makes it an almost real-time experience. (In my experience, photos I email from my iPhone on-the-go hit the site within 1-2 minutes. Kind of like peering over Robert Scoble’s shoulder and watching the live tweets from thousands of people fly by in real time.
There’s nothing that particularly Save the World special about that, but that’s just fine.
