Location, Location, Location: Brightkite and Dopplr Milan Release

I have always been interested in location-based applications, or geoloco, as I call them. There’s some new things brewing in that front.

Brightkite

Brightkite is the newest, and perhaps most handsome, entrant in the geoloco space where Dodgeball and Meetro have been playing for some time. Britekite allows me to indicate where I am, geographically, and to publish that information to my friends, or the whole world.

After setting up an account, and fooling with it a bit, I have this account page, including a stream of attached photos:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

brightkite.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The My Friends page is cool, especially the map view:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

brightkite.com my friends, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Brightkite provides fine-grained access control on privacy (although the ‘private mode’ hasn’t been implemented yet)(4/20/08 - Apparently it *is* implemented, but some tool tip still says that it hasn’t.):

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

brightkite.com privacy, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The service implements publishing to Twitter, so now I can update my location at Brightkite, and my Twitter followers will see a tweet like this:

Waiting for Jay Schippers - http://bkite.com/000j1

Stowe Boyd about 1d ago

Here’s the URL embedded in the Twitter message:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

brightkite.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And on the mobile side, there is a Dodgeball-like messaging syntax, where you send SMS to a short code. This can be used to check where friends are, check in at various locations, and message other users. Looks pretty cool, but this is the part I have used the least to date.

All in all, seems to be a beautifully designed and highly intuitive and useful application.

Dopplr: Milan Release

Dopplr, the social travel site that I have been using for some time (see Dopplr and Dopplr and Tripit: Closeness In Space And Time), has gone into a new release, codenamed Milan. The high point of the release is an integration with Mr & Mrs Smith , the boutique/luxury hotel guide. The Dopplr blog has this to say about it.

Here’s a page from my account for San Francisco:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

DOPPLR: Mr & Mrs Smith on San Francisco, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Seems pretty minimal and not tremendously social — a tab all on its own, no mechanism for people to comment or even share the information. Hmmm. Since I can get this already at Mr & Mrs Smith, already, and way more, why would I need this tab in my life?

The ‘Tips’ tab — where Dopplr users can leave tips for others — is getting shorted in this, since it is potentially very social, but the implementation so far is so minimal that it is almost unusable and not well configured. Why not allow people to have a richer experience, not just based on selecting tags for ‘hotels’ or ‘restaurants’ but maybe a map representation? “Show me recommended restaurants within walking distance”, for example?

With it’s recent funding (see TripIt Raises 5.1M, it looks like TripIt may be poised to supplant Dopplr as the innovator in the social travel space. I have already stated to depend on the service for things that Dopplr doesn’t attempt to do — like parsing travel logistics out of Expedia email, and creating calendar entries from them — but now TripIt’s social side is growing directly into Dopplr’s game.