I don’t know a lot about Adam; we’ve been fellow Brightkite “friends” for a few weeks. But seeing his pictures brings the damage home. I’m guessing this is his parents’ place, since family members were the only ones allowed in yesterday.

Brightkite is new and relatively untested. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it can do for me (Steve Rubel checked it out and said “eh”)… the same question I asked about twitter when I joined in January 2007.

Regardless of Brightkite’s future, it’s another chance to see how services like twitter and Brightkite can take us right to where things are happening. This stuff doesn’t replace traditional journalism (the gathering of random bits of information to find a coherent story), but enhances it, adds texture and depth, giving people who are directly affected by an event the tools with which to make their own statement about it.

Best wishes to Adam, his family, the folks in Parkersburg, and all others in my home state who suffered in this weekend’s storms.

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.