Brightkite

It'd be handy if Brightkite allowed me to set my location by calling in and entering in my zip code. Texting is an additional cost for me.

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 morning I tried to email a photo to Brightkite, and I ended up getting an email back saying "Sorry, but we could not post your photo." Okay, no prob, something probably bonked, it happens. I try it again: "Sorry, but we could not post your photo."

I didn't figure it out until I got in front of a computer and tried posting the photo through the website. Turns out my wordy caption was 70 or so characters over the limit. :D Okay then! But when I was out and about, the email I got could've said something like, "Sorry, but we could not post your photo, because you do go on. There's a character limit on the caption of (x) characters. If you can edit your caption down, try it again."

Would it be possible to send more descriptive error emails?

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 ^_^

Automatic location tracking via mologogo.com would be great for those wanting continuous tracking. It can be initiated by sms for non-continuous.

Is there a way? Or can there be a way to publicly mark an address as someone's house or my house? So someone knows I'm at my house or elsewhere instead of just a random address?

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