I’m still on a Brightkite break. I’m not really sure how to quantify my feelings about Brightkite without sounding pedantic or somehow aloof. The people that work there are, no doubt, extremely concerned with the community that uses it and, from what I’ve seen, go to great lengths to keep the service up and running.
In a nut, I guess I’m just upset with the lack of updates. It started right before SXSW this year. Updates to the service that made any real dent in the ever growing, pie-in-the-sky wish list that I had for the service were all but nonexistent.
If you remember I jotted down what I wanted from Brightkite. Rather than put my biggest wishes out there I shared what I thought they were pretty reasonable things to wish for. Favorites? Preferences for Flickr? Fixing Childs, PA on Brightkite? Hashtag support? And a few others. It has been 5 months since I wrote that post. How many of those updates have come out? None. I don’t expect my wishes to their roadmap but I did get a direct response from several Brightkite team members after writing that post and they said they were working on those things. So I suppose my expectations were a bit high.
A few days ago I asked on Brightkite if anything was new? Chris Tingom, who uses Brightkite every day, succinctly responded with "Nothing new".
Brightkite was somewhat recently acquired and while I’m sure this has something to do with the amount of work they’ve been able to get done on the service there, I sure hope it doesn’t mean that Brightkite is simply going to go away or be changed into something altogether different. We saw this type of slow down with Pownce right before it was acquired by Six Apart and immediately disbanded. As I’ve said before, Brightkite had a lot more potential than Twitter until Twitter hit the mainstream. I still think that Brightkite has a lot to offer – they just need to address the needs of their ever growing community.
Update: Brady Becker, Founder of Brightkite, has responded to this over on my "is anything new" question on Brightkite with: "@cdevroe new stuff is coming soon, we promise! Your wish list has not been forgotten. (In fact, in the pending release many of your items have been addressed)".
I’m really happy that I got a response (and such a quick one at that). Mood has shifted back towards optimistic.
