Remember Brightkite? Launched with the help of TechStars back in August 2007, the location-based ‘check-in’ service once rivaled the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, but never really got the traction it needed to keep on competing and win the day: the startup killed the check-in functionality about a year ago to focus on group texting.

It’s been quiet about Brightkite ever since, and the company’s two founders moved on long before the pivot to group texting was announced, starting a new venture dubbed Forkly (our review).

Now, a reader tells us, it appears Brightkite (which remained the name even after their 2009 merger with Limbo) is changing course again. The company’s mobile apps are no longer available on the App Store or Android Market, and the website displays only a logo and this not super-reassuring text:

This is not goodbye… we’re just moving on to something better.
Watch this space. We have an update coming soon.

I hate to say it, but can’t resist the pun: looks like the future isn’t going to be Brightkite.

I’d get in touch with Brightkite to see what’s up and if we can deadpool them yet, but I frankly don’t know who could answer that question, or how to contact anyone at the company for that matter.

In what may be the first high-profile casualty of the location wars, Brightkite, an early player in the space, has today announced they’re officially killing off the check-in functionality of their service.

Brightkite noted back in September that they’d likely be partnering on check-ins with one of the other major location players going forward. At the time, they said: “We pioneered the check-in several years ago, but as we’ve said believe it is now a commodity. Expect to see less and less emphasis on checking in on Brightkite, and associated streams of user content. Where appropriate, we’ll support checking in to third party services like Facebook and Foursquare.“

And now they’ve set a date on the execution: one week from today. And in the latest post, they’re no longer even mentioning any potential check-in partnerships (though they do note that location sharing will be a part of the new app). From their blog:

For the first time this will be a Brightkite app without check-in, posting or stream viewing functionality. Starting from 17th December, you can expect to see the check-in/posting and streams functions start to disappear from our apps and sites. These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them.

The service notes that if you’d like to keep all of your old check-in data, you should visit this link before December 31 to get your last 1,000 check-ins (if you need more, you’re supposed to contact them directly).

This pivot follows co-founders Martin May and Brady Becker leaving earlier this year to start a new company (Forkly — more here). We’ve also heard talk of layoffs at the company recently.

“R.I.P. @brightkite Now I know what @dens must have felt like when Google shut down Dodgeball,” May tweeted today upon reading the Brightkite blog post announcing the news.

Going forward, the focus for Brightkite will mainly be on the success they’ve had with group texting. Their new ambition is to be “the default text messaging application on all phones,” they note.

Update: Or as one Brightkite user explained via an image:

So what is Forkly? Essentially, it’s a recommendation app for finding food. But unlike the popular Foodspotting, which focuses on individual dish pictures, Forkly is focusing on personalized restaurant recommendations based on your own tastes.

How exactly they’re going to do this is still a bit vague. Becker writes that the current power players that rely on star ratings from people you don’t know is a flawed system. And he also says that simply asking your social graph is flawed too because friends have different tastes. Here’s the key part:

We’re building Forkly to make it ridiculously easy to match your taste buds with the food and restaurants around you. Forkly helps you to quickly capture your opinions about your dining experiences. We then use those opinions to offer personalized restaurant, food and drink recommendations, based on YOUR individual tastes.

So it sounds like they’ll have an app which will allow you to quickly rate a restaurant and its food based on certain criteria. They’ll then match those criteria against others in the system to recommend new places and dishes to you. Of course, that’s my overly simplified guess, I’m sure. The magic will be in if it works or not.

I’m sure we’ll hear more in the coming weeks and months.

Brightkite has always been an interesting startup. They were in the location game early (a 2007 TechStars launch) — perhaps a bit too early, as the true hype in the space has only really began in the past year or so. Nevertheless, they were able to get an exit (well, sort of a merger/exit) in 2009. And they’ve been able to accumulate over 2 million users. And they’re still plugging away at location — but going forward, they’ll be doing that without two founders, Brady Becker and Martin May.

May actually left a couple months ago, as Brightkite noted with a farewell post. But Becker has also left, we’re hearing. And his bio page seems to confirm this. And while they may be out of Brightkite, they’re not out of the location game, we’re also hearing.

We’re told that Becker and May have started a new stealth startup called Forkly. The service’s website gives no clue as to what it is beyond the phrase “we are forkly.” But the Twitter account indicates that both Becker and May are working on it (those are the only two accounts it follows), and states that “We’re a new, stealthy startup in Denver.”

Becker’s LinkedIn also says that he’s currently the founder of Forkly.com (and YouAreHere), but gives no more info. May’s bio doesn’t say anything about Forkly, but he is the mayor of its headquarters in Denver (which apparently used to be a restaurant).

But a source tells us that Forkly is definitely a new startup in the location space. This obviously makes sense given both Becker’s and May’s experience and areas of expertise. Aside from Brightkite, the two were also the driving force behind Check.in, the multiple check-in web app being run under the Brightkite banner. (The two of them actually demoed it for us at SXSW this past year.)

We’ll try to dig up more about Forkly. Stay tuned.

Update: I’ve just confirmed with Becker that he did recently leave Brightkite and that yes, Forkly is his new startup. He declined to give more information about it at this time.

Location-based social networking service Brightkite has experimented with the concept of badges in the past, threading in the footsteps of Foursquare and Gowalla, who have popularized if not pioneered the now-familiar virtual loyalty and rewards system.

Last May, the startup partnered with coffee chain Starbucks to create a set of branded badges, self-reportedly the biggest brand integration they had done until then.

Today, they’re ramping up their badging efforts.

Brightkite badges now have levels. For example, if you use their mobile website or one of their many mobile apps to post 10 photos, you’ll earn a ‘Slick pic’ badge at level 1. You can monitor your progress in a status bar on the badge, which will be visible on the web or your iPhone. Once you get to level 1, Brightkite will tell you what to do to get to level 2, and so on.

According to Brightkite, the biggest reason to introduce levels to its badges was so stores, bars, restaurants and brands gain ways to reward users / customers. The company is setting out with a number of partnerships: check in to stores that sell Sharpie products, and you’ll earn their custom badge and automatically enter into a sweeps to win $1,000.

Get down to some serious social networking via the Brightkite service, and Dentyne will be sponsoring your ‘social swagger’ badge. Read the August edition of Redbook magazine, and there’ll be a surprise there for you, as well.

Brightkite says it is currently working out the details for more branded badge programs with the likes of McDonald’s, Visa and the CW. The company says they also have a “bunch of home-grown badges live and plenty more to follow” and invites users to discover them and “level up”.

Back in December, the location-based service Brightkite rolled out a new layer to its Augmented Reality (AR) view: ads. At the time, these were Google ads that showed up in a “relatively unobtrusive” way, as ReadWriteWeb put it. Now, those ads are getting more obtrusive because some big brands are on board.

Brightkite has been working with both Starbucks and McDonalds to bring more effective AR ads to reality (pun intended). Rather than showing a Google ad at the bottom of the Brightkite view screen when you see a circle in AR view, there are now giant logos for the brands in the AR view itself. For example, see the Starbucks VIA logo in the image in this post. As you can see, when you’re near a retailer than carries VIA, the logo will appear on the screen. Clicking on the logo will give you more info below that including links and videos that you can play inline.

Brightkite has been working with McDonalds on this advertising technology as well, and the fast food giant showed it off at their internal conference recently.

I’m still of the mindset that AR is a bit away from practical use (though it is awesome for some games). But products like Google Street View are pushing it closer to the mainstream. The question is: is it a good idea to try and monetize AR before it really even takes off? I’m not sure I’d be thrilled about using the technology if I’m just going to see ads in my face. Well, unless they look like they do in Minority Report.

Check.in is an HTML5 web app made by Brightkite that allows you to check-in to a venue on multiple location-based services. Those services including Foursquare, Gowalla, and of course, Brightkite. This works by taking advantage of those services’ APIs alongside some backend place matching that Brightkite does on its end. The result is being able to check-in across multiple services in a few seconds rather than taking a few minutes to load up the various apps and hit the required buttons on each to check-in.

Since Check.in went live in closed beta in March, over 6,000 users have tried it out, generating some 135,000 check-ins, I’m told. The average user checked-in 20 times, and there were over 2 million place queries in the beta period.

That last statistic speaks to why we need some sort of unified Places database (this app just does place matching, not unification). Brightkite had indicated they’d be willing to do something like that, but the problem is the other companies who are all saying the right things now — but may not be so quick to hand over their databases with the places they’ve collected. It’s also an extremely hard problem to solve since not all the data is perfectly aligned (misspellings, slightly off GPS, etc).

The point is, even if everyone seems to say they want it, it’s not happening anytime soon. And so we have Check.in.

Since the closed beta began, Brightkite has also added two new services to the check-in roster: Whrrl and TriOut. Each of these is still experimental alongside Gowalla, which is currently on Check.in thanks to an API work-around (Gowalla has a read-only API at the moment).

Some other data that Brightkite saw during the beta trial was that people check-in most often on Friday, and least often on Sunday. And most users opt to use two of the check-in services, followed by those who choose to use three. Four and five were much less popular (though Whrrl and TriOut weren’t available the entire time), and one was somewhat popular — though I’m not sure what the point of using check.in is if you’re only going to use it with one service.

Since it’s HTML5, Check.in will work with iPhones, Android phones, and yes, the iPad. Just point your web browser here to find it.

When partnering with brands for you location-based network, it’s probably best to choose companies that are ubiquitous. As in, Starbucks ubiquitous. With over 17,000 store locations around the world (including over 11,000 in the U.S. alone), the chain, as everyone knows, is everywhere. So it looks like Brightkite chose wisely.

Brightkite has a new deal with with coffee chain that with give users of the service deals on drinks. They’ve also worked with Starbucks to create branded badges for the first time, moving into the virtual good realm that rivals Foursquare and Gowalla have been exploring for a while. Brightkite says it’s the biggest brand integration they’ve done so far.

So what’s the deal? Brightkite doesn’t want to give away all the details at the risk of ruining some surprises, but one aspect is that if you check-in (or post something like a note or image) at a local Starbucks during “Frappuccino happy hour” (that is, 3 PM to 5 PM until May 16th), you’ll get half-priced Frappuccinos. You’ll also unlock other features and rewards, including Frappuccino badges that you can pin to your profile.

Again, this is nothing new in the world of check-in services, but it shows that different brands are getting more interested in striking deals with many of the players. And why wouldn’t they? All of these different services offer ways to get more customers in stores.

Brightkite says to expect more deals like this in the future.

Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly all the companies involved in the space talk about such an idea enthusiastically, and regularly. Yet no one seems to be doing much about it just yet.

Back in March, I moderated a panel featuring key members of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, and Plancast. When I raised the idea of a unified place database, all seemed to be in agreement that it would be a good thing. Even when I brought up that their own place databases were a way to keep their users around, everyone seemed to think there were better ways to do that, and that the benefits of a unified place database would outweigh any costs. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley reiterated that to Erick last month, saying that a “‘Facebook Connect of places’ would be amazing.“

This past week, at Web 2.0 Expo, the discussion started up once again, with a different group of people in the space. This time, key members of Twitter, Google, and Brightkite talked about the idea. Of those, Martin May of Brightkite seemed to be the most adamant about it. When moderator Brady Forrest asked if Brightkite could build such a database, May responded with, “We could.” He went on to say that they’ve spoken with several other companies about such an open place project.

May also hinted that Brightkite may open up the data they’ve gotten from Check.in, their service that allows you to check-in to Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite via one application. Because that app has to search each of those services’ databases to find the correct place to check-in at across all three, Brightkite likely has some interesting data tying at least some of these places on the different databases together.

Steve Lee of Google (working on Latitude) jumped in to say that he likes what Brightkite is doing with Check.in, but thinks that it’s still too cumbersome. “There should be a standard, but it’s not without complications,” Lee said. These include technical challenges and licensing issues, Lee noted, saying that it would be difficult for Google to do this because so much of their [place] data is licensed from third parties.

“Google is interested in solving the problem, but it’s not easy,” Lee concluded with.

Twitter’s Elad Gil (who came over when Twitter bought GeoAPI) was more much more optimistic about a solution. In fact, he’s positive it will come, and thinks that all of the various location applications need to be prepared when it does with ways to truly differentiate themselves. “All these applications have ot think about how to differentiate. It’s hard to build out the database of locations, but fundamentally the technical problems will go away,” Gil said.

That rings true. But the question remains: who will build it? Twitter seems to be passing the buck to Google, who seems to be passing it right back to Twitter. Brightkite clearly wants to, but will any of the other players really trust a rival with their data? If not, will they start to restrict their APIs to make it harder to access the place information in bulk?

The obvious solution is to have a completely open database, as Erick laid out. But again, that is easier said than done. We’ve seen that time and time again with a number of different initiatives. “Open” sounds great until someone has to actually do it, be in charge of it, and get users to use it.

That leaves the 800-pound gorilla: Facebook.

As they get ready to unleash their location-based component, one that will supposedly integrate with venues, I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll be not-so-slowly gathering up and organizing a massive database of places. They’ll open this up, via the Open Graph API, but everyone will complain that it’s not really open. Then Twitter will step up with their solution (they’ve been accumulating the necessary data for some time now). Then Google will too. It’s amazing what a little competition can do.

Of course, if that happens, we’ll be left with the same problem, just at a higher level. And the dance will continue.

[photo: flickr/pedrosimones7]

According to the startup, which boasts more than 2 million registered users, the average Group Text user sends a whopping 17 messages per day. Already, its total usage is growing 19 percent on average per day.

Brightkite is now sending more than 20 million messages a month, nearly half of which are regular SMS messages, we’re told.

Today, the self-proclaimed “social discovery network” is announcing the availability of its Group Text service in Canada.

For those who are not familiar with the service: Group Text is a free location-based service that works through text messaging, the web, mobile web, and iPhone and iPod touch devices. The product allows users to text up to 25 people at once – when one person replies, everyone gets the message, so you can go back and forth.

Best of all (and probably the reason why it’s becoming popular so quickly), the basic service is free which means less coin for greedy carriers – usual rates for texting apply, obviously.

For the record, the difference between Group Text and say, Twitter, is the tie-in with location awareness and closed circle communication. Although one could argue that Brightkite is thus becoming more like Twitter with its one-to-many communication tool while Twitter is becoming more like Brightkite with all its recently launched and announced features.

Check.in is an application that lets you check-in with multiple services at the same time. Or, as they put it, it’s “on check-in to rule them all.” While the team showed it to me briefly at SXSW (and CrunchGear got some video of it in action), they’ve actually given me access to it now to play around with. And I’m happy to report that it works great.

So how does it work? Well, for the time being it’s actually a mobile web app. Eventually, the plan is to release a native app version for the different platforms, but in order to get it out there relatively quickly, they made a web version that works on mobile browser that offer HTML5 support for location (currently the iPhone and Android phones). When you load it up, the browser asks for permission to pull your coordinates, and a few seconds later it pulls up a list of venues it believes you’re near. When you click on one, the app does some “magical matching” to find the venue across the various services. (If it’s unsure it asks you to confirm the venue for each different service — a bit tedious, but it goes fast as it’s just one click.) You’re then taken to the final check-in page where you can leave an optional message (which will also get sent to each of the services) and if you’re good to go, you simply hit the check-in button, and you’re done.

Currently, Check.in works with three services: Brightkite (of course), Foursquare, and Gowalla. But it’s important to note that the team is likely going to have to pull Gowalla support because that service doesn’t yet technically support writing to their API (only reading from it). Check.in found a work-around through an undocumented API. Still, the Check.in team hopes to add other services quickly as check-in APIs become available.

So how much time does Check.in save? At least a few minutes just for the three aforementioned services that it currently works with. Remember, checking-in with all of these apps requires not only that you open each one, but that you wait to pull friend data and location data before you can check-in. Check.in cuts out most of that load time by removing the friend element, and doing the location loads all at once.

If they’re able to get all the services playing nicely with their check-in APIs, Check.in is going to be the perfect solution for check-in fatigue. But don’t be surprised if one of the bigger players, like Facebook, are thinking about this as well.

Check.in will be launching in beta very shortly.

I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue.

Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be.

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the midst of the “war” — Foursquare and Gowalla.

Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one.

And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a preview of it here).

And LocationFu is another (web-based) app that allows you to check-in with Foursquare, Brightkite, Fire Eagle, and Twitter simultaneously.

But there’s a problem with these solutions too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only, which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But, he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted.

Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database. That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious.

A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system. Of course, any service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service.

Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it.

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on location. All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m definitely not buying it now.

From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to ensure that you will use their service, and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now, it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing.

[photo: flickr/intagiblearts]

(Sorry for the shaky-cam…must have had too much caffeine).

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. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.

Today, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Brightkite is unveiling its new Group Text service. It’s both a feature on the website and a standalone application in the App Store (it should be available shortly). With it, Brightkite is latching onto one of the most popular and fast growing categories in mobile applications: group texting. Unlike regular text messaging, this type of app allows you to message many people all at once (and go back and forth). And better, in a world where cell providers are still managing to rip-off users with their text message bundles or $0.15 rate per-text, group texting is absolutely free.

Services such as textPlus have already made the functionality very popular on the iPhone, and now Brightkite hopes that will translate into converting different types of users over to its core location-based service. The reason is that built-in to the Brightkite Group Text app is the core Brightkite functionality itself. While it’s a bit buried to the left hand side of the menu, you can both check-in at venues, and get check-in updates from other users in the app.

It’s a smart play. As other location services such as MyTown have proven, there’s a market to get users outside of the traditional early-adopter crowd into location by doing something novel (in their case, a straight-up Monopoly-type game). Group texting users seem to be rabid about the software, so why not give them a little location-based bonus to play around with if they desire?

At the same time, this app provides a nice compliment to the Brightkite service itself. With it, users get another social outlet to communicate with, sending messages or pictures, and having them threaded both in the app and online. And yes, it still works with traditional SMS messaging, as Brightkite was lucky enough to be granted a texting shortcode (41414) and it can work with these threaded conversations. For example:

By adding three digits to the end of the code, each person can now have 100 simultaneous threaded text conversations running on their phone.
41414-001 = conversation 1
41414-002 = conversation 2

And thanks to the SMS support, you can contact anyone in your address book, not just those using the app.

The service is now live on Brightkite’s site, and look for it later today in the App Store.

As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way.

Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually.

Those concerned about the privacy implications of this need not worry, Vicarious.ly doesn’t pull actual user names from the companies mentioned above. Instead, they simply note that “someone” checked-in at a venue. They do, however, give the venue name, which is a hyperlink. So if someone just checked into Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin on Gowalla, you’ll see a link back to the Gowalla page for that venue. Likewise, if someone uploads a geotagged picture to Flickr, you’ll see a thumbnail of the picture in Vicarious.ly’s stream, and clicking on it will take you to that picture’s Flickr page.

It’s fairly amazing to see just how much activity there is even today, the day before the conference starts. Tomorrow and the weekend should be insane. “The amount of real-time, location-based information we’re indexing is staggering.  We wanted a powerful way to showcase that, so we built Vicarious.ly and targeted the launch to coincide with a massive gathering of geeks,” co-founder Matt Galligan says about the project.

You’ll note just how much of the activity are check-ins from either Foursquare or Gowalla. Those two are likely to be the two main competitors in the location war that will take place this weekend. (If you’re surprised not to see tweets in the stream, it’s a bug that SimpleGeo hopes to squash tonight).

For more on SimpleGeo, which has a powerful set of tools to easily provide geolocation infrastructure for other companies (such as the new hot startup, StickyBits), check out this and this.

It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite, one of the earliest hot location players.

CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data.

Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage.

What users of Foursquare may know as check-in or mayor special, Brightkite calls Local Promotions. And they have a page on the site where local businesses can sign up for free. On that page, they note:

We would love to help your bar, cafe, coffee shop, or business reach out to the local community through local promotions. We’ll let nearby Brightkite folk know your business gives them preferential treatment, and that they should stop in for a visit. Fill out the form below to get started.

Brightkite says these promotions are seeing a lot of interest from all types of brands. And usage is strong with over 100 brands including big ones like Gap, Ben & Jerry’s and Time Warner Cable, seeing over two percent response rates when these notifications are inserted into users stream. And the best ones are seeing five to ten percent. When compared to more traditional ads, those numbers are very solid.

Like Foursquare check-in and mayor specials, the Brightkite deals offer things like free (or heavily discounted) drinks and meals, but also extend to things like discounted hotel rooms, car rentals, and even dry cleaning.

So is Brightkite making any money off of these? Yes. While many of the smaller local businesses use the service for free or close to free (to both prove the model and drive growth), Lawson notes that some of the big national brands are spending some big time money to advertise locally. These campaigns range from $10,000 to $200,000, Lawson says.

Something else that interests me about Brightkite is their unique approach to social relationships. When it started, Brightkite had a symmetrical model, much like Facebook and Foursquare, which requires users to accept each other as friends. But late last year, the company switched the model to be an asymmetrical one, like Twitter, where one party can follow another without permission.

This may seem like a horrible idea for a location-based service given the privacy implications, but Brightkite’s is a bit different of an asymmetrical model. “Our model is asymmetrical (like Twitter), but reversed. With Twitter, you decide who to follow but anyone can see your content.  With Brightkite, you decide who to share your content with, but you can only see others if they decide to share with you,” Lawson notes. He continues, “We are convinced this is the right model for location based services – people want to be in control of who knows where they are. We turned away from the handshake model (Facebook, Foursquare) because we found users didn’t like the social pressure of having to accept a friend request. Just because you are happy to share your location with me, doesn’t mean I want to share mine with you, even though we want to maintain a relationship.“

As someone who has dealt with this many times before, I see his point. Lawson says that generally Brightkite users have been receptive to the changes, but says that some older users liked some of the more advanced features of the old model better — and Brightkite is working to get some best-of-both-worlds options for them.

Brightkite merged with another location-based network, Limbo, last year and raised some new funding. They face a battle in warding off the fast-charging hot location networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (not to mention Yelp and the new Google Buzz), but all of them appear to be benefiting from brand interest in the local advertising space.

The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications.

The Nokia app can be downloaded from the Ovi Store already and should run fine on all Symbian S60 5th Edition phones, including the Nokia N97 and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Brightkite curiously doesn’t use its own brand name for the Palm app, which was baptized Parafoil instead. The application was custom-developed for Palm’s WebOS platform and is compatible with the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi devices.

I’m told the reason that it isn’t named Brightkite, is because the program was actually developed by two Brightkite users, John Barker and Kyle Johnson, based on the startup’s open API.

As you can tell from the third screenshot embedded below, Brighkite has adopted the ‘check-in’ moniker to let people update their friends on their current locations and what they’re up to.

Brightkite says the United States remains its biggest market, but that international markets are growing in importance, which prompts the company to expand its range of handset support. The company adds that it currently sees about 2 million people using Brightkite on a monthly basis, across all platforms (though the vast majority uses it on a phone).

Alternatives to Brightkite include Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, aka-aki networks and Rummble.

A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox.

I’ve written before that location is the missing link between social networks and the real world, and I absolutely believe that’s true. But the way most of these location-based services are built right now, they are becoming an unmanageable mush of finding the location of the people you actually care about. Perhaps the most popular of these networks right now, Foursquare, is a perfect example of this. When I was following 20 people on the service, it was very useful. When I was following 50, it was still useful, but there was some clutter. Now, at around 250 people, I find myself scrolling through my stream just to find certain people that I actually want to know their location. I cannot even imagine what Scoble does with the 1,700+ people he follows.

Of course, this problem is entirely my own fault. If I don’t want to know where someone is, I shouldn’t follow them. But there are two problems with this. First, there are some people that I would like to follow some of the time, like if we’re all in a different city at a conference together. Or maybe if I’m just bored and looking for something to do on a particular night. Second, and more importantly, today’s social networks carry a social pressure to accept many people that request your friendship. Again, of course you don’t have to, but not doing so can often be misconstrued as a slight on that person. Bigger picture: Today’s social networks are predicated on the idea of “more.” The more friends you have on these networks, the more social you are, the better you are at the service, the bigger ego you get, more, more, more. None of that is true, but the perception (as it is with most things in the world) is that more is better.

With these location-based social networks, more is actually worse, and that’s awkward.

There are a number of things that these networks could do to alleviate some of these lesser issues. One would be to create friend groups, like Facebook and now Twitter offer, to filter friends. Another would be to offer a “mute” button, like Brizzly offers for Twitter users that you don’t want to unfollow, but don’t want to see in your stream all the time. But one of Foursquare’s strengths is that it’s very simple right now. It’s all about checking-in to places and seeing a stream of your friends’ check-ins. If you start to add layers to that, you become the mess of rules and settings that Facebook has become.

And because the concept of location-based social networking is still so new and potentially scary to people, I would argue that it’s imperative that Foursquare and these other services do keep it as simple as possible for now.

Right now, Foursquare actually does two things to try and help with the issue of social overwhelming. First, it shows you only the friends that are in the same city that you are currently in first (it recently added friends in other cities to the bottom of the stream). Second, on the iPhone, it offers Push Notifications on a user-by-user basis. This can be very helpful to tailor location-seeing needs, but it doesn’t alter the app in anyway, and when you visit it, you still see the full stream with everyone. Neither of these solve the social paradox issue.

Another service, Gowalla, also has Push Notifications, which are useful. But that service is less built around the friend stream idea, and it’s much worse if you try to use it for that. Not only do see friends who are in other cities in your main stream (with no indication of what city they’re in), but you are forced to see all your pending friend requests at the top of that list. I’m currently scrolling through dozens of them just to get to the main stream. I could either accept or ignore them all, but I don’t want to. Again, social pressure.

In some ways, this is a good problem to have. If users are starting to feel overwhelmed because they have too many friends on your network, it means there are a good number of people actually using it. For most people, Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t there quite yet. But if they keep growing, they will be.

And in some other ways this is reminiscent of Twitter when it was younger. Many users started following a lot of people before feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of updates from people you might not care about so much. But Twitter evolved rapidly from the “What are you doing?” mundane updates, to be more of a multi-layered broadcast service. It’s hard to imagine these location-based services being able to transform in a way that makes them naturally more compatible with having a large group of people you follow. Remember too that Twitter is an asymmetrical network (you can follow others without them having to follow you), while Foursquare and the like are symmetrical (you have to accept and follow them in return). This will always limit the “socialness” of your service, but it seems to be a requirement giving the privacy implications of location (though another location network, BrightKite, recently moved to be more asymmetric).

Ultimately, I think if these location-based networks are to survive (and not just get taken over as a feature of Facebook), they’re going to have to shift the mentality that all social networks have to have huge, tightly wound social graphs. Facebook used to be of that mindset to a certain extent, but as we’ve all seen recently, they’re trying to extend their social graph in a major way now. The good news is that the business models forming around these networks don’t require your social graph to be huge. But at the same time, it may be difficult to convince people about the vitality of your network if it doesn’t have a ton of inner-site traffic, which is obviously easier to achieve is everyone is friends with one another and clicking on their pages.

Maybe it’s about convincing people that real world “social” is more valuable than social networking “social.” And that the number of friends you have on these networks is increasingly just a useless ego-metric. But it’s a hard sell because deep within our collective psyche, more is always better.

[photo: flickr/arenamontanos]

Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.

This new feature is already live on Loopt’s website, but as we alluded to back in May, this will also be a part of the Loopt 2.0 iPhone app, which should be released shortly. But things have even changed since then. As you can see in the screenshots, a key feature of this new Loopt is the idea of the “Check In.” Obviously, this is a direct reaction to competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla which are built around that very idea. This is a key part of the new Loopt as checking in helps it recommend things for your friends to do.

But Loopt is also using other data to recommend places. It has a partnership with Zagat to get restaurant information and pulls data from sources like Citysearch to further its recommendations. All of this data has allowed Loopt to create what founder Sam Altman refers to as a “local search engine.”

And this is altering Loopt’s business as well. As we’ve previously covered, location is a potentially powerful tool for business models involving things like coupons. Foursquare is starting to delve into this, but it isn’t yet making money from it. This new version of Loopt is taking full advantage of this. The company has already struck deals with partners such as Jack In The Box to serve up virtual coupons when users of Loopt are nearby a restaurant.

Fans of Loopt will still recognize many of the features of the service, but everything has been improved, Altman says. One thing not included however is Mix, Loopt’s service that helped users potentially find dates. That was spun off into its own app last month.

Loopt also offers some things that Foursquare doesn’t such as the ability to see where all your friends are checked in on an actual map (rather than just a list of where they are). And you can also see not only that friends are at a particular place, but how others have rated it (with a smiley face or a frowning face). This allows you to see if a restaurant is not good, for example.

The iPhone is proving to be a boon for location-based services, but it also has a very big weakness: Third-party apps cannot run in the background. This is one reason why the previous version of Loopt didn’t work well on the device; it kept track of your location, but only when you had it open. Loopt recently launched a new feature that allows you to get around this by pinging your phone to get your location with the help of the carrier. But that service costs extra money, a huge barrier. Moving to the concept of check-ins seems like a better way to keep people using your application.

So can Loopt take on the younger location-based upstarts with its new features? We’ll see, but Loopt has a couple of big advantages: 1) It works on over 100 mobile devices (Foursquare, for example, works on only a few right now — but any phone can access its mobile website). 2) Apple seems to love Loopt. They’ve included it in commercials, and routinely feature it in the App Store.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here.