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Will Brightkite Succeed Where Dodgeball Failed?

Started by Nick O'Neill · 10 months ago

Back in 2005, Dodgeball.com which at the time was a rapidly growing company was snapped up by Google. By 2007 the developers called it quits and ended up leaving Google with some negative words for the global behemoth, “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporti ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Len Kendall

    1 year ago

    I've been using it or a few weeks now. I'm not thrilled with their mobile functionality. I wish that instead of being SMS based, it acted more like a mobile facebook of sorts. The whole point afterall is to use it on your wireless device.

    Additionally, I wish it had more sharing options outside of just twitter. Zannel for example lets you post to twitter and facebook mobile at the same time.

    Good Post!
    reply
  • acafourek

    1 year ago

    I've used it a few times and I like it because it is location+twitter+pownce.

    Now all it needs is a conversation feature such as the @username in twitter.
    reply
  • Charlie

    1 year ago

    The reason it's primarily SMS is that anybody can use it, with pretty much any mobile phone. No fancy phone needed, no loyalty to any particular carrier needed.

    They have an iPhone app too, which I'm assuming will be available when the iPhone app store launches.
    reply
  • Charlie

    1 year ago

    Nick, what is it about wide-spanning cities that makes them such a problem? For a network growing virally through personal contacts, I would expect to see pockets of people relatively close together using the service. Any dense downtown-type area is great for this.

    The expectation, of course, is that it will very soon be commonplace to have phones with gps, and of course that will be supported as much as possible (the native iPhone application already uses the phone's location features). But when getting into this space, it is a smart move to start early with the technology everybody already has in their hands. And that is SMS.

    It's also surprisingly easy to do the common tasks once you set up some placemarks for yourself. You send a message like "@work" when you arrive at work, "@park" when you stop by your local park for some frisbee after work, etc.
    reply
  • Justin Thorp

    1 year ago

    For me it's more... *sigh* just one more app that I have to use.
    reply
  • Jennifer Van Grove

    1 year ago

    I've written about Brightkite a few times already and have had the opportunity to communicate regularly with Martin and Brady, Co-Founders, via Twitter and Brightkite. These guys are pretty darn smart.

    A few things...

    They launched the private beta just a few weeks ago, and it's already spreading like wildfire. They told me that they wanted to launch now to get feedback immediately, but that they're planning on introducing all types of new functionality in the coming months, including GPS support.

    I'm actually one of a few people beta testing the iPhone app, which is pretty awesome and I'll blog about it as soon as I get the okay from them. They're also working on mobile apps for other phones too, including Google's Android.

    The SMS commands are cool, but there are a ton. One trick, "? business name" returns all businesses/addresses near your last check-in (and you can then check-in using the results returned). I use this all the time, sometimes to cheat and just find the address of a business for other purposes.

    My interview with Martin May is here:
    http://www.startupsd.net/137/brightkite-localiz...

    It should be interesting to see what happens in the next few months
    reply

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