Brightkite

It would be really cool to utilize the XFN standard. This can help Brightkite share and work well with other social sites. In case you are not familiar with XFN it could be a simple as:
hyperlinks to my page would include a rel='me' tag.
links to friends could would include a rel='friend' tag.
Digg and Twitter currently use XFN. And I can see many aggregation apps looking for it. I just saw a presentation by Don Park who spoke about XFN and a XFN spider he wrote. Very interesting.
http://gmpg.org/xfn/
donpark.org

I really like the site and am excited for you!
Jed

This is a great service. There are just a couple more things I want to see.

I was going to say better twitter integration, but I just figured out how to do it. So not that. I want to see more ways to find friends, like gmail contacts, facebook friends, myspace, etc. Perhaps an API (if you haven't made one yet that I missed) so that it can be integrated with websites and programs. Perhaps even more in-depth integration with social networking sites than I mentioned.

And more invites. More invites = good. Assuming, of course, your servers can handle it. Don't want the same thing happen here that happened to twitter ^_^

Browsing through some of the privacy ideas here, it seems like a great number of them could be solved simply by attaching a privacy level to individual locations. For instance, when signaling BrightKite that I'm at home, I would have Private mode attached to Home, so before it would notify anything at all to anyone it would set me to private than send the check it that I'm at home (but private). Likewise I could attach public to the Cafe, so when I get to the Cafe from home and checkin at the Cafe it would set everything to public and announce that I'm at the cafe.
This would even solve some of the issues with SMS checkins. I would no longer have to set Public or Private before checking in at a location, I would simply /know/ that as soon as I checked in where I was the appropriate level of privacy would be applied.

ShaBot

How about taking in lat-long coordinates, for locations off the postal grid? That'd be cool for adding some of my favorite recreation spots to "check in" from during this upcoming mountain biking and hiking season.

Allow sub-location check-ins. After checking in with "@location", use "#sublocation". This is different from a 'say', because it's a refinement of the location.
Examples:
"@rec center", "#in the pool"
"@work", "#conference room 3"
"@Hacienda Colorado", "#The Tequila Room"

using the @ symbol with usernames has the same behavior in BK and Twitter. Not everyone is using both applications, though.

Perhaps an alternate USER 404 page could be utilized that says "sorry, that person is not yet on BK, perhaps they're on twitter?" with the word "twitter" going to twitter.com/username.

I'm not sure if any other web apps use the @username method

I know in a country like Belgium we will have fewer users than in certain other countries. So I know there will be few friends around me.
It would be nice if I could widen the 'Nearby notifications' or 'around me' radius to about 20Km, as 4km is not going to give me much of activity.
It would be a nice extra.

At the top in the search bar, after typing something in the Where textbox I hit tab. However, pressing tab does not take me to the What textbox, instead it takes me to the first link underneath the Where textbox (2911 Walnut St, Denver, CO).

It would make more sense from a usability standpoint, I believe, for tab to take you to the What textbox. Is it possible to set the tab order for these two text boxes?

If you add RSS photo enclosures to your feeds, FriendFeed should be able to show photos for updates instead of generic links to Brightkite.

I would like Brightkite to support oEmbed. Instead of me posting a photo to Flickr, my site, and Brightkite, I'd love to just post it to Flickr and/or my site and have Brightkite automatically, somehow, "link" to it while still showing the photo in-line. Like Pownce does.

e.g. http://pownce.com/JonRohan/notes/2636... (flickr photo link only)
oembed docs: http://oembed.com/

Hello Guys,

Can you put a DYNAMIC maps page representing a PIN of my location and my friends location?? Also it would be great to see places of interest around me. The maps should be free to hover over as integrated by whrrl.com

Can I just *click* the map to indicate a location? Your address database seems a bit sparse :(

Would be very cool if the note that I post on Brightkite were integrated and shared in Twitter!

It would be really great if there were more options for the types of notes you're leaving at a place. For example, I was at a restaurant yesterday and wanted to leave a mini review when I was back at my computer. If I could have somehow categorized that as something more than just a status update, it would allow folks to filter. I realize this may be straying a bit from the 140-character microblogging goal, but bkite has a great interface that shouldn't always be constrained by SMS limitations.

There should be a box for for typing in notes and posting pictures on the profile page in the web app. Also, the tabs for each of the categories in the profile (your Stream,
Places, Friends) should be consistently visible when you navigate to them. Oh yeah - and it would be nice to have the nudge option *not* appear when you're looking at your *own* empty profile when you're logged in. That was unintentionally hilarious. :P

The single best thing you could do for BrightKite is make checking in automatic, so my phone *totally automatically* tells my friends where I am. I want the service to be invisible. I'm constantly forgetting to check into my new places, and it seems silly that I need to remember to do so in order to make good use of the service. It's a huge weakness.

Badge for my Blog? I'd like one.

It would be nice if we could toggle if a checkin is public or private, OR have the ability to mark a location as "Always Private".

My biggest gripe with brightkite is having to delete checkins because I forgot to toggle my private status before I checkin at my house, and/or, forgetting to toggle when I leave my house and marking places private that can be public.

It would good to be able to edit placemarks. Currently you can either checkin or delete only.

It is nice that I can change the order of placemarks by drag and drop, since I want to put "home" and "work" always at the top.

It is also good to be ordered by number of "visits".