Brightkite

» see brightkite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

brightkite came out of california in 2007, founded by brady becker, martin may, and alan seideman, who had previously built an SMS notification service called loopnote. it was one of the first products that took dodgeball's check-in idea and made it work on a real smartphone instead of just an SMS short code. you opened the app, said where you were, and got back a feed of every brightkite user within whatever radius you set. there was even a public visualization called the brightkite wall, a real-time stream of check-ins worldwide projected at conferences.

i was 23 to 28 across brightkite's lifespan, which on paper is exactly the demographic for this. in practice the product never made it to turkey at any meaningful density. the location-social wave of 2007-2010 was a US west coast phenomenon, with austin and sxsw in 2009 as the cultural peak event. the iphone i could buy in turkey was on a vodafone tariff that did not even allow tethering, and the app store country logic for the first two years made a lot of US-only apps invisible from istanbul. brightkite's whole premise depended on density of users in your physical area. there were maybe two of us in ankara.

so this is the kind of grave i can describe accurately as a piece of internet history without being able to claim i lived inside it. brightkite is the bridge that made foursquare's mechanic feel inevitable rather than weird, and a generation of US techies got their first taste of "broadcasting where you are right now" through it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

brightkite ran in two layers. underneath was an SMS check-in tool that worked on dumbphones, the kind of thing you could text from a feature phone in a country where smartphones were still rare. on top was a smartphone app for iPhone and android, with a symbian build for europe that gave away brightkite's hopes of breaking out of the US market. the public-facing brightkite wall ran above both, a real-time visualization of every check-in worldwide. the API was open enough that the mattress factory art museum in pittsburgh integrated it for visitor messaging, which is a sentence that sounds invented but is real.

~ the decline ~

limbo, a separate mobile-social company, acquired brightkite in april 2009. the acquisition was supposed to give brightkite a proper revenue stream and a bigger user base. instead, by may 2010 the new owners turned off the check-in functionality and pivoted the whole thing to group SMS. the founders had already left. by late 2011 the apps were pulled from the stores, and the website was running a goodbye page that pointed nowhere. foursquare had already taken the entire location-social category. the brightkite wall went dark with no replacement and no archive. the founders went on to other startups, and the URL eventually got parked.

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