For those of you unfamiliar with Brightkite, here’s a quick overview:

Brightkite is a location based, micro-blogging, social networking platform. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last five years, you’re probably familiar with sites like MySpace and Facebook. One of the features of these sites is something called a status. The status you set is meant to reflect something about your mood, or what you’re up to, i.e.. “Adam is writing a blog post”. This concept is similar to an away message on an instant messenger account. The first site to gain traction as a platform that specializes in status updates was Twitter.

Brightkite retains the idea of status updates and friending other Brightkite users, but adds the concept of a “check in”. When you “check in” in Brightkite you’re saying where you are, geographically speaking. So, status updates (called notes in Brightkite) are posted from a place. This means these notes often have an annotative quality about the place where the user is checked in. Brightkite users also have the option of posting photos at a Brightkite location. There are a lot more features in the Brightkite platform including: an iPhone application, a mobile site, and integration with other social networking platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Fire Eagle. To find out more about Brightkite sign up for your free account at: www.Brightkite.com.

The Brightkite Wall is a kiosk-style application that provides a feed form a place, a person, or for search terms in the Brightkite ecosystem. The application was built using Adobe’s Flex 3 Framework for building Flash Rich Internet Applications.

One development challenge we faced was to implement a user interface that scaled in size regardless of the resolution of the display it was running on. Because the Wall can be launched on any machine, those machines might have a display like a small laptop screen or up to a large projection display. The Wall user interface needed to scale appropriately for each use case. This means fonts, images, and skins all need to look, relatively, the same one any given display size. Although this feature isn’t extremely difficult technically, it is a bit tricky. However, Flex does offer some advantages when it comes to implementing a UI like the Wall.

Another challenge was implementing an application that would execute in a full screen mode and reliably for a long period of time. To achieve this requirement we implemented a “BoundedList” UI class that automatically disposes of unused list items, but also allows for various transition effects to be applied as new items appear in the lists.

The data source for the wall is the Brightkite RSS feed. The application is parameterized to allow for dynamic configuration (on launch), of the RSS feed, polling rate, Brightkite place, and the size of the bounded lists. The parameters are passed using Flash variables and accessed on the initialization of the application.

Although The Brightkite Wall is a fairly simple Flex application, built in just a few weeks, it is a great example of how Flex can fit into a platform. Many companies rely on Flex for their entire product line, and it is often a great choice for many products. In the case of Brightkite, they had a specific problem to solve and Flex happened to provide an excellent solution for the problem.

The Wall is still in beta and Brightkite needs your feedback on the kinds of features you’d like to see in the next version.

The Brightkite blog: http://blog.brightkite.com
Brightkite on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/brightkite

Whenever there is a conference or event, there’s a secondary bit of action taking place behind the scenes: the backchannel. Here, the attendees are live blogging, twittering, posting photos, and streaming live video about what they’re seeing on stage or in and around the venue. Twitter has always been the microblogging platform of choice in this scenario, but starting today, they just might have new competition from Brightkite, the mobile social networking service that’s making a name for itself among the early adopters.Last night, Brightkite released a new feature for their mobile social networking platform called the “Brightkite Wall.” This wall displays the live stream of notes, photos, and checkins at any one place. When launched full screen, the Brightkite Wall’s placestream can be shown on any monitor, projector, or TV, which obviously makes it perfect for conferences and events.

Using the Wall

To get started, simply browse to the desired place and click the new Wall tab. Then click on the embedded Brightkite Wall to go full screen. Organizers can even customize the Wall beforehand, if desired. The message and location name can be modified, the shortcode can be selected for use within the U.S. or outside the U.S., and checkins can be turned on or off.

Of course, Brightkite has a much smaller user base than Twitter, which could have made this new feature a non-starter. However, Brightkite has that problem covered. With the Brightkite Wall, anyone can participate by texting a pre-defined shortcode provided for you by the service.

Better Than Live Blogging?

Brightkite’s Wall may soon beat Twitter to become the microblogging platform of choice for live events because it offers a much richer stream of information. Instead of just displaying 140-character notes, Brightkite’s Wall also displays photos. Combined with notes and checkins, this makes the Wall a much more engaging experience.

For those virtually attending the event, watching the Brightkite Wall could end up being even better than refreshing a blogger’s post featuring their “live” coverage of the event. A live blog only gives you one point of view and set of images. Even if it’s a group effort, it’s not the same as being immediately tapped into the thoughts and reactions of all the event’s attendees as you are with Brightkite.

Potential Problems

Our only concern for this new feature is that it doesn’t appear to be any sort of administrative control over who can configure what. If some rogue conference attendee wanted to, he or she could highjack the Wall by customizing their own personalized greeting for all to see. That could lead to problems, especially if the message was profane or offensive.

Another concern is that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of archiving system in place, so while the Wall may be a great real-time view into the thoughts and activities that are taking place at a particular point in time, going back to view older images and notes could be a challenge if the same locale (address) is used over and over again for subsequent events.

The Wall feature is still in beta, though, so as people begin to use it and submit feedback, it may be updated to even better reflect people’s needs than it does now.