Brightkite's Sneaky Plan To Get Regular Users Into Location: Group Text
Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart. — While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they've lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Context & Ripple Effects
Brightkite enters March 2010 as the biggest player in a shrinking pond: its 2 million-plus user base dwarfs Foursquare and Gowalla, but the momentum has moved to the newer check-in services — Foursquare passed 1 million check-ins per week in February and bought its first television ad on Bravo, while Gowalla squares off against it at SXSW for the top location-tagging spot. The shadow over both is bigger still: TechCrunch argued back in November 2009 that Facebook is poised to dominate geo outright.
Group Text is Brightkite's answer to being out-hyped rather than out-sized: instead of asking mainstream users to publicly broadcast where they are — behavior that Please Rob Me turned into a national privacy story just weeks ago — it pulls them into location through private group messaging, where checking in isn't the point.
First-order effects
- Brightkite gains an on-ramp that doesn't require users to adopt check-in etiquette: friends who would never publish their location to a game can now be drawn in through plain group texting, protecting its 2 million-user lead during SXSW week.
- Foursquare and Gowalla head into their SXSW face-off knowing the incumbent they're chasing is changing the contest — competing on communication habits rather than badges and mayorships.
Second-order effects
- The check-in rivals face pressure to decide whether game mechanics alone can hold mainstream users, or whether they need lower-friction social features of their own to match Brightkite's approach.
- Brightkite's private-by-default framing positions it well against the public-location backlash: while Foursquare spends energy answering robbery-risk claims, Brightkite's pitch sidesteps the objection entirely.
Third-order effects
- If mainstream adoption flows through private messaging rather than public check-ins, the location market splits into two structures — broadcast games for enthusiasts and utility sharing for everyone else — leaving the broad middle open to whichever platform already owns people's conversations.
- That structural gap is what makes the Facebook question from late 2009 acute: the company holding the default communication graph needs only to switch on location to reach the mainstream users every check-in startup is courting.
The trend: Location services are splitting between gamified public check-ins and everyday private sharing, with the winner of mainstream adoption likely decided by who owns the underlying conversation, not the game.