Webware

Social networking is fun. You can communicate with friends. You can share experiences with them. And you can even plan get-togethers. But finding where they are isn't possible with most social networks. You'll need to keep sending messages back and forth to figure out where to meet up.

With the help of location-based social networks, you won't have that problem any longer. All of the following services will allow you to see where friends are at all times. The guessing game is over.

Location-based social networks

Brightkite Brightkite is a great location-based service. After you download the free app onto your mobile phone, you can start finding friends.

When you become friends with someone, you can see their location as they travel away from home. You can also find folks who are in close proximity to you to get to know them a little better. Brightkite even lets you take pictures. That picture will then be geo-tagged, so your friends can see where it was taken. Brightkite is a really nice location-based social network. And since it works on any mobile phone, the Web, and an app is available for free in the Apple App Store, it's definitely worth trying out.

Brightkite helps you locate your friends (and communicate with them).

(Credit: Brightkite)

Loopt Loopt is designed specifically for GPS-enabled mobile phones. When you sign up, you need to input your mobile phone number. From there, Loopt will determine your location. You can then share your location with those who request to see where you are. You can even take pictures with your mobile phone and geo-tag them.

If you don't want someone to know where you are, Loopt lets you block access to your location. It's a great privacy feature. Loopt works with practically any mobile phone. It also has an app available for the iPhone. Both versions are free.

Loopt has an iPhone app you'll want to check out.

(Credit: Loopt)

Three hundred eighty-five development hours, 3.5 median hours of sleep per night, 265 pounds of food, and roughly 4,000 cups of coffee. That's what it took for five teams to compete in last week's Microsoft's Mobile Incubation Week, an intense five-day hustle to create the best Windows Mobile application, from concept to finished product.

In the dark auditorium at Microsoft's modest Mountain View, Calif., offices last Friday, the breakneck development rate showed. Two bleary-eyed developers stepped onto a dark stage before a smattering of peers, press, and judges to present their showing: a Windows Mobile version of Brightkite, a location-based social network that lets you create a photo journal of your day that friends can track.

Gokivo Navigator will feature turn-by-turn directions and a Facebook tie-in.

(Credit: CNET/Photo by Jessica Dolcourt)

While Brightkite founder Martin May and his co-developer, Brady Becker, were the only team to take the stage without a finished application to demo, their mobile social networking application has two distinct real-world advantages over most of the other competitors--Brightkite's established user base and existing applications for iPhone, Google Android, BlackBerry, and the Web. All that's missing from the Brightkite lineup, May freely admitted, is a Windows Mobile app--even more essentially, the know-how to develop for Windows Mobile. Although Brightkite's Windows Mobile presentation consisted largely of prototype slides, the team is hoping they'll have a Windows Mobile client ready by the time Microsoft launches its Marketplace for Windows Mobile in the second half of 2009.

The cohort

Brightkite wasn't the only established company in the field. Networks In Motion, the brawn behind Verizon's VZ Navigator, AAA Mobile, and Yellowpages.com, was also there, introducing a first peek at Gokivo Navigator for Windows Mobile. It's the first NIM-branded turn-by-turn navigator that is already available for a subscription fee on AT&T phones, including the BlackBerry Bold.

Brightkite, one of the half-dozen or so companies vying for market share in the location-based social-networking space, has merged with another mobile start-up called Limbo. The official branding of the company will be Brightkite now, but its home base will now be at Limbo's headquarters in Burlingame, Calif.

Limbo's focus is on mobile games, as well as text-message alerts: sports scores, celebrity gossip, weather, horoscopes, and the like.

It's not totally clear how the two will merge their technologies, but a little bit of background was provided on the Brightkite blog. Brightkite will have access to Limbo's engineering team and back-end system, as well as relationships with cell phone carriers.

"We plan to move all Limbo accounts and key features to the Brightkite platform. Limbo users gain an enriched product, enhanced user interface, and new Brightkite friends," the post by co-founder Brady Becker read. "We expect this transition to happen within the next few weeks."

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reports that the deal was "nearly all stock" and that the company will have access to a $9 million funding round that Limbo raised in January.

AUSTIN, Texas--By now, the story of how Twitter exploded onto the scene at the 2007 South by Southwest festival is legend in technology circles.

But here at SXSW 2009, the notion of the perfect match among community, service, and event seems flipped on its head. Many people are discovering that a monumental oversaturation of tweets is reversing the value that Twitter offered at SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008 for finding friends and great parties.

At SXSW, the standard is for everyone to include the tag "#sxsw" in their tweets. For example, on Friday, I was looking for sources for a different story and tweeted, "If you are launching an iPhone app at #sxsw, or know someone who is, please let me know. Thanks!"

That's a great convention because it allows anyone wanting to know what's going on to search Twitter for posts using any search term important to them. That has proven useful for people wanting to find out what's going on after earthquakes, the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Hudson River airplane crash, and many other events. At SXSW in 2007 and 2008, this was a big part of how people navigated their experiences.

At a conference with scores of panels and seemingly just as many parties, being able to determine what's worthwhile is crucial for people trying to get the most out of their time here.

This year because of the conference's impressive growth and Twitter's broader mainstream appeal, it has become almost impossible to find the same value as in the past. I did a search for the "#sxsw" tag on Saturday afternoon and found that there had been 392 tweets with the term in just the previous 10 minutes. That number mushroomed to more than 1,500 in the previous hour.

There were nearly 400 tweets using the #sxsw tag in just 10 minutes during the SXSW conference on Saturday afternoon.

(Credit: Twitter)

While those numbers demonstrate that people here are without question using Twitter like never before, it also means that it's never been harder to find what you're looking for amid the flood of posts about the panels, barbecue, Web celebrity spottings, and deep thoughts about social media.

This has forced people accustomed to relying on simple Twitter searches to get creative to find the nuggets they need.

"I've been purposefully putting the ("#sxsw") tag...to as many things as I can, even just going to my hotel," said David Kadavy, a user-interface designer from Chicago. "I started looking (for the tag) at first. But there was just so much of it that I started just looking (for) the people I'm following and filtering for the (tag)."

That's fine for people who are sitting at a computer, but many people using Twitter at SXSW do so on mobile phones. And being the cutting edge of the digerati set, the most common device in evidence here is the iPhone. But Kadavy said he hadn't found a way to do the kind of filtered search he wanted, and as a result, seemed hard-pressed to accomplish what he'd need to while on the go.

Some at the conference have found themselves being aware of the oversaturation dynamic and have been trying to reduce the number of tagged tweets, hoping to cut down on the flow.

"I was definitely guilty yesterday," said Andie Grace, a senior staffer with the Burning Man organization. "I grabbed my phone to tweet that I was grabbing my luggage (at the airport)....But I stopped myself from Twittering and I thought if everybody did this, it's going to be useless. So I stopped myself because I would like to search and see what panels my friends are finding interesting and where they're planning to be."

To be sure, there are plenty of ways people can see what their friends are tweeting. But the never-ending flow of tweets with the "#sxsw" tag are forcing attendees to find alternatives.

That, of course, has presented opportunities to other services to gain the kind of passionate users that Twitter engendered during SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008. In fact, some services are even incorporating Twitter, creating a way to get the best of both worlds.

"I just got (to SXSW) but have been watching from afar, and it did seem a little crowded," said Mario Anima, the director of online community at Current.com. "It seems like (a lot of) people are also using Brightkite and Foursquare to keep in touch."

Anima said that Foursquare, a brand-new service from the team that created--and then sold to Google--Dodgeball, is particularly useful for navigating SXSW because it allows people to post updates about what they're doing and where they're going that are then incorporated into their Twitter feeds. That way, their Twitter followers can see what they're doing without also being a Foursquare member.

Of course, SXSW 2009 may well prove to be where Foursquare itself explodes, a la Twitter in 2007. The service was under wraps until just a few days ago, and its iPhone application was added to Apple's App Store just in time for the conference.

Using this method to see what your friends are up to at SXSW, Anima said, frees people to use Twitter for broader purposes. For example, he said, it means that instead of trying to find within the "#sxsw" search flood what friends are doing, users can look for trends, like what people are saying are good panels.

Even that method might be overly cumbersome, however, given the hundreds, or thousands, of tweets being sent each hour at the conference.

To Laura Roeder, a consultant from Venice Beach, Calif., there's another solution altogether.

She said that she's been following SXSW Baby, a blog and Twitter account where the best of SXSW is being aggregated, allowing followers to restrict the information overflow.

"Last night, they re-tweeted a Gary (Vaynerchuk) party," Roeder said, speaking of what have become famous impromptu wine parties at SXSW, "so I knew about that."

Remember Brightkite, the social network meets microblogging tool we wrote about last week? The creators have been nice enough to grace us with 100 invites to give away to Webware readers. Just fill in the Wufoo form after the break and we'll get one your way as soon as we can. Invites will be sent out once all 100 spots have been taken.

Update: All gone. Sending them out to folks now--check your spam boxes.

BrightKite is a service that's not showing off its stuff at the Web 2.0 Expo but getting a lot of buzz from some other bloggers here. It's a microblogging tool the likes of Twitter, Pownce, et al with some handy location-based features. What's the point you ask? It's got a whole lot more social networking built-in from the start. It also shares one of the things that made Meetro and Twinkle so cool, by letting you see what people around you are doing.

Like Fireball you can attach your current position to small 140 character posts. It also lets you see who's around you based on when they "checked in." Users can create for places they frequent often in order to avoid having to type it out each time they post. After setting where they are, others in the vicinity will be able to view those posts in a cluster--complete with how close the other users are by the meter. What's especially neat is that you can set it to give you notifications on when things have been posted to your general vicinity.

My one qualm is that setting where you are is not currently an automatic process--you have to manually go in and set your position from one of the pre-sets or add a new location on the spot. Compared to Twinkle (review) which uses geo positioning via cell tower or Wi-Fi connection, having to enter this information in manually makes the process seem archaic and tedious. The good news is that automatic location is coming later this year when BrightKite begins to roll out its mobile apps, starting with a native iPhone application launching in June.

Also in the works is a way to find new friends based on your location habits. Founder Michael May tells me he's working on a way to let people connect based on percentage of familiarity. Not to be confused with a dating site, BrightKite will simply cross reference your locational habits with other users and give you a "neighbor score." Get Starbucks every morning and post a message about it? In theory BrightKite could hook you up with other people who do the same.

BrightKite is currently in private beta. You can sign-up to gain entry here.

Tell everyone what you're doing with words or pictures, then geo-tag it with BrightKite. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)