Connected Well

If you follow me on Twitter, the ultra-easy status-update app would have told you that I’ve been camping at Bear Lake last week… but you wouldn’t have known exactly where. That part of the picture is left out.

But more important than you trying to find me, it is still very difficult is to find out what is around you when you are at a place unfamiliar to you–to access the world of knowledge about a place–in a easily digestible map-based, easily transportable format.

For example: Two things I wanted to do this week included getting to the beach, and going for some hikes. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money for access to the beach, and at least one of the hikes I wanted to be enjoyable for some of the people with me who can’t hike treacherous terrain.

To accomplish this, I did the usual–but had to do it all from my Blackberry because my laptop was unavailable–I googled it. I searched phrases like “Hikes near Bear Lake, Utah” and “Good Beach Bear Lake, Utah“. Both turned up promising results, but I had to DIG for them:

Beach Access at Bear Lake:

• There is a State Park at the South end of Bear Lake [Lat Long: 41.965633,-111.3995 (google maps)] that charges $8/car/day for access. Seemed like a reasonable option if a free beach couldn’t be found.
• Bear Lake.org’s Watersports page gave me some good ideas, and I found that there’s a Bear Lake State park on the Idaho side of the lake too (which, honestly I didn’t even really understand we were so close to the Idaho border)
• Finally, I found a PDF file (not mobile compatible, but my Blackberry handled it with a little effort) that shows free beach access all along the South West edge of the lake, just South of Ideal Beach Resort and RV park. Right along the road, at Lat/Long 41.893149,-111.366026 is free, public beach access which is pretty nice.

The bottom-line is, we were able to find things after searching, but there was no clear way to search one place and say:

• Here I am (GPS would be nice, but Verizon disables that in Blackberrys! FAIL)
• I want to ______________________ (insert activity)
• All from a MOBILE interface

And have it provide results.

You’d think we would have figured this out by now!

Rahhb Tools, human bear lake, coordinates, find, follow, GPS, location, mobile, utah, where

My initial way to explain BrightKite is that it’s like Twitter (what you’re doing) + Location (Where you’re doing it), which I like. I am trying to determine how to use it (mainly because I use Verizon for my phone service, and it’s currently not supported).

But, I just bumped into it’s Map Friends feature, which shows you where your friends have last “checked in” and how you could find them. (See a screenshot, below of my current friendmap)

This seems to fit well with Brightkite’s vision to enable a social network that helps facilitate real-life friendships as well as virtual ones:

Wouldn’t it be nice to have social community around the locations you frequent? To actually meet new people, not Facebook-to-Myspace, but face-to-face? MySpace has done a really good job of facilitating meaningless cyber friendships with unprecedented ease. Ironically, Facebook does not easily enable face-time with friends at all. At Brightkite we believe tangible community has a place around real-world locations.

My current beefs with the platform will surely be addressed soon:

• Since I use Verizon, I can’t “check in” via mobile messaging yet.
• There’s no Mobile Web version (that would help)… but they’re working on it.
• My brightkite check-ins are reposted to twitter, but I want it the other way around, too (similar to my facebook status updated automagically via the twitter facebook app.
• I want to comment on people’s brightkite postings (ala FriendFeed), and allow comments on mine.

But I will say overall that my favorite, clear usage for this app at the moment is that it really does help you transcend just what people are DOING, and the conversation (which twitter does so well) and mash that up with actually understanding where people ARE, and what they are doing there.

If BrightKite doesn’t work for you, maybe you need one of these kittehs, instead:

Rahhb Social Networking brightkite, facebook, friends, geotagging, GPS, in_real_life, IRL, location, mobile, mobile web, Networking, real life, Social Networking, socialnetworks, socnets, status, twitter, verizon, when, where