Twitter importing of friends takes a very long time. My suggestion as a UI professional, and frustrated user is to allow multiple friend requests at once. This could be done as a series of checkboxes next to each user.

find friends using brightkite through email address book (integrate with gmail, others)

I think having groups/communities would be a great way to organize Bright Kite. I like the site, but a lot of my friends are people from forums that I don't recognize their new user names. So maybe a way where people can join a group and see other members to separate from real life friends. Possibly even maybe like categories that we can categorize users. I also think having it display names like twitter or other sites would be a nice addition. Also, does the happening around me function actually work, cause it doesn't seem to show people in BK universe that I know are near me.

Privacy settings should allow a user to define who can see their friend's list. For instance, if a user sets his posts/checkins to only be viewable by friends and trusted friends, everyone can still see their list of friends. For true privacy, there needs to be an option on whether your friends list is viewable and by whom.

This is important to be truly private. I have a friend who has been stalked online at other various social network sites and the stalker was contacting her "friends" and causing issues. Locking down the friends list would help reduce the likelihood of this happening.

I find that I'm often hanging out at certain places with friends. Rather than all of us each checking in individually, it would kind of be cool to check-in with or for friends.

For example, if I go to a party and show up with a friend, I'd like to check in for both of us (why should my friend need to pull out her cell as well?). The SMS syntax could be:

@Ritual Roasters +username1 +username2

Now, whether you automatically push out that update to your friends' friends is open for discussion, but I imagine that if my friend has marked me as a friend on Brightkite, it could be an opt-in permission that I set: "Let my friends check in for me." "Only let my trusted friends check in for me."

And, when I visit my dashboard, I would see a message to confirm the check in permanently: "Your friend [username] checked you in to Ritual Roasters four hours ago. Were you there? Yes / No"

I'd like to see an additional map: area view to zoom in on local friends without trying to "aim" google maps. I am lucky enough to have friends all over the US but most of the time I want to use the map to see those within 10 to 20 miles of my current location. Since the map now defaults to the entire country, I end up spending lots of time zooming in on the Chicago area. This takes enough time that I am beginning to avoid the map all together.
Thanks for considering it!

put list view before map view on friends list

how about being able to add friends/find friends from:
gmail
yahoo
pownce
friendfeed
facebook
flickr
vimeo