BrightKite is everything Jaiku should have been. A lifestreaming service that built upon Twitter’s strengths while providing much needed mobile features. Unfortunately, Jaiku was a service built for Nokia’s and targeted a European demographic. SMS was not available on many US based carriers and the interface for mobile phones was lacking.

Enter BrightKite, a new site that burst onto the scene this week and now is in an invite-only beta.

Think of BK like a location aware, mobile Twitter. BK uses the same conventions of friends that Twitter does, but allows you to set privacy options on those friends which will allow them to see the exact location you are sending updates from. How does BK know where you are updating from? Easy, you tell it through SMS or the web.

Once you have checked in (the term for letting BK know where you are) you can easily set a place mark.

The advantage of checking in and setting place marks isn’t immediately obvious. However, once you get more friends into the system this opens the way for a really cool way of segmenting conversations by location. So, if you want to meet up with your bros for burritos at Baja Fresh go for it! I’ll be there eating a tasty Nacho Burrito!

One of the more popular uses for services like Twitter is life streaming from conferences or other events. BrightKite users will be able to see who is sending in updates around them to facilitate easy meet ups. You will also be able to go back and look for conversations that took place in certain locations later. Right now this kind of segmentation is handled through hash tagging.

Bright Kite attempts to play nice with Twitter by allowing you to set options to send updates made through its service directly to your Twitter friends through Twitter. There is only one problem with this - it can be spammy if you are sending duplicate updates to the same friends on multiple networks AND some of the great features of BK, like being able to display your exact location, can be inadvertently pushed out to the Twitter universe. You see, Twitter doesn’t respect the permissions settings you can store on BK and unless you set your BK account to “public” mode your updates don’t get pushed over to Twitter anyway.

Seems like a bit of a catch 22.

BK becomes something more than a Twitter clone when you are set to Private, where you get all the cool location specific features. The trade off of course is that you aren’t able to use it as an interface to Twitter.

Why would you still want to use BK as a gateway to communicating with your Twitter friends you might ask? Well, it is a pain in the ass to manage multiple life streams. Also, as of the writing of this post there aren’t very many people using BK as it is still private beta.

It will be interesting to see how BrightKite progresses.

Right now, it has me excited. I can’t wait for the iPhone interface for the service too which hopefully will be a native app and not a web based one.

Check out these other posts on BrightKite for more information! And by all means, send me a friend request on BK or Twitter!

My Twitter Page

My BrightKite Page