Brightkite’s GroupText Is a Text Messaging Party Line
When I think about the lowest common denominator of mobile communications, text messaging follows close behind voice. Obviously, every phone offers voice capability by definition, but texts are nearly as ubiquitous. Email is catching up as consumers leave basic feature phones for smartphones — and many feature phones offer either a native or add-on email solution. But text messaging capability is still farther along in terms of reach across handsets. Brightkite, a location-based social network service knows that, which explains the company’s new GroupText feature.
GroupText reminds me of an old-school party line amongst friends that uses text messaging instead of voice communications. Looking to get a group of friends all together in one location? You could send emails, make phone calls, or use an online invitation service. But I keep coming back to that lowest common denominator of the text message since it’s instant and most everyone has access to the service. GroupText bundles the text message conversation in a chat-like view, making that lowly text function social and powerful — think threaded text messaging with multiple people.
The whole concept is perfect fit for Brightkite, given its location-based bent. If I want to chat with a bunch of folks about a topic, I’ll have the conversation in medium like email. But if I’m simply trying to get a group in one location, I’m going to shoot venue info and other event details in brief text — something I can’t easily do in Foursquare, which is my current LBS service of choice. GroupText doesn’t require my friends to have a Brightkite account, so there’s no mandatory network registration hassle. Each GroupChat can handle 25 friends and responses are sent to all in the group — folks can also attach pics or indicate their location so there’s no need to ask “when are U getting here?” And the entire group interaction is available on the web for those who aren’t currently mobile or for “Monday Morning Quarterbacks” that want to replay the conversation — after a wild night on the town, I see some after-the-fact entertainment value here.
Brightkite recently submitted a software update to Apple that includes the GroupChat feature and anticipates arrival in the iTunes App Store soon. Until then — the lowly text message lives on!
Images courtesy of Brightkite
Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
The problem with Brightkite is that they are running their site on a Rails framework. That’s all well and good as long as they remain relatively small but if they ever grow to an appreciable size, you can expect the kind of bumpy evolution that had so many people watching Twitter so closely. There is something horribly fascinating about the kind high speed wreck that Twitter so narrowly avoided.
I don’t know if that’s always the case. 37signals (the birthplace of Rails) has managed to scale up without too much trouble.
I think that you are missing the point. Sure, you can get Rails to scale horizontally. The problem is that it is much harder to scale Rails than it is to scale other frameworks. You will wind up needing more in terms of infrastructure resources to handle, say, 1 million requests per day with Rails than you would with an equivalent, say, Catalyst, Symfony or Django app.
Been playing with this for about a half hour and the text messaging part is almost completely unusable. You can add friends but unless they already use the service it assigns them a random number so it’s impossible to know who’s who, and there doesn’t seem to be a way for those users to go to the site and change their random ID to a real name: it creates a new, different account that needs to be added.
The web interface is pretty sweet, but I haven’t been able to link my web account to my phone yet. The confirmation message sent to my phone is blank.
Hopefully they get these issues patched up soon now that they’re launched. I wonder how long this will stay alive. 3jam offered a similar service but SMS gets expensive after a while and almost all their users abandoned them as soon as they made it a pay service.
Pana.ma seems a much more compelling solution, as it enables to use voice and/or text in a group conversation.