May 8th, 2008
Earlier this week I was at home in Shallotte, NC, a small town between Wilmington, NC and Myrtle Beach, SC. There the light of Web 1.0 barely shines and there’s not much Web 2.0 action. I actively Twittered the departure of the recently commissioned USS North Carolina (SS-777) from the Port of Wilmington from my vantage point in Southport, NC. Nobody seemed interested, except one friend who pointed out that I spent nearly 3.00 in text messages sending updates about it. Yes, that’s right. I have a voice-only plan and simply send in Tweets via text message. Here soon I am thinking about an iPhone, but the jury is still out on all of that. So, the limited functionality of test messaging is all I have. While at home I tried out my new Brightkite account, thanks to an invite from a Twitter friend. Of course, I was the first person in the area to check in with Brightkite and it seemed pretty pointless, but I knew I needed to try in in an environment where the light of Web 2.0 was much brighter. Today I spent most of the day in transition back to Chapel Hill, with an extended stop in Wilson. I made sure to update my location via text and while passing through Wilmington, noticed that four other users were in the area, and I decided to say hello to them. I also received several notifications that people had accepted my friend request, and a notification of a pending request for me. After asking for help on the commands, I found myself constantly grabbing my phone to type in a new command and wait for the response. After several minutes of this, I realized what was going on.
Paul Jones was saying the other day that Twitter was basically the Web 2.0 version of IRC chat rooms and he is correct, in many ways it is a public chat room. Brightkite, with its advanced functionality based simply upon text commands reminds me of the MUDs of the early 1990s. The graphical web was in its infancy, and users created a virtual reality around text descriptions and interacted using text commands. That is exactly what I was doing with my phone. Sure, its not a completely virtual environment, as its linked to physical location, but the interaction was the same. I had a low fidelity link and was interaction in a fully functional way. On top of that, I can check the visual web interface when I get back to a computer.
My primary point is that I was fully engaged using these text commands and wasn’t distracted by the rest of the web. I think that this is the kind of engagement that Web 2.0 services seek to achieve and I think Brightkite has a real future on the social web. They’ve done an excellent job including all web and mobile users, regardless of technical limitations and I can’t wait to see the benefits of it now that I am back in the Triangle and as I travel this summer. I’ve also asked one of my iPhone carrying friends to check out the Brightkite application. I’m sure I am going to be just as pleased, and I look forward to things to come from the Brightkite team.
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