Ever since I discovered the whole GPS on my cellphone thing back in 2005, I’ve been hoping for a Location Based Service (LBS) to allow me to simply click a button and say “you are here, share with everyone?” When Brightkite launched back in .. 2007, I was sold. “This is perfect for meeting up and organizing during conferences and conventions!”. Aside from the lack of direct upload via GPS to the site, it was damn near everything I could want an LBS to be, an application that can be used to physically connect with actual humans within my immediate vicinity. Awesome!

In walk Foursquare and Gowalla, way later. They have cute badges or stickers, they game their users into chasing a point structure, they even found a way to throw a biscuit at you for frequenting places (Foursquare’s promotion of local businesses & offering special to mayors of places, for example).

Dandy. I’m not interested, and in true Scoble fashion, “here’s why”.

I can appreciate the approach these websites are taking, and I can understand their interest in creating a game to keep their users becoming lemmings over retrieving points, badges and mayor statuses. I can understand their motivation, from a business aspect, why the incentives for “frequent place visitors” is important for revenue. But in the end? It’s a cattle coral to get you to chase down places, check in to them, share a tip, and hopefully score some imaginary thing and have it put an icon on your account. Where’s the community value?

What’s wrong with Foursquare:

1. It’s a coupon machine
2. It’s a game
3. It doesn’t support community
4. You can’t find people near you
5. The mobile web-interface is absolutely terrible

What’s wrong with GoWalla:

1. It’s a “sticker” machine.. for digital pack-rats it looks like.
2. The UX is awkward
3. iPhone and Android only? Next…
4. Have you seen their mobile interface?
5. It’s way too “cute” to take seriously
6. You can’t find people near you
7. It doesn’t support community

Yelp provides an LBS, I believe… This, I haven’t played with but I definitely will.

Why BrightKite?

In a word. People. It’s about us. It’s about finding those you know. It’s about connecting when you’re out and about. You could check in at a pub, have a friend check in four doors down, get a notification, and shoot a text, “I’m around the corner from you, let’s meet up and grab a beer!” or whatever.

Additionally there are services attached like the photo-sharing experience which is repetitive of say, Tweetphoto and TwitPic, but at the same time – LBS’s should have photos of locations, this allows us to preview what it looks like before we even go. Check out the atmosphere… That’s sort of important. More so than say… Who the mayor is, or what some random person you don’t know said about their pesto.

I want GPS powered apps for Maemo or S60 to roll around. I won’t get in to why I will never, in a gazillion years, own an iProduct. I’ve ranted about that enough. I do, however, understand that since I’m in a 2% minority in the United States with my Nokia preference, so that’ll probably never happen.

All it would take for Foursquare to be better than Brightkite is to ditch the stupid game, become community/people-centric, leave the “business” layer intact, and let people post photos… to name a few.

All it would take for Brightkite to be better would be to be more business centric, in that it needs to accept business names to be coupled with addresses, if applicable… that’s pretty much it.

Truth be told, I could live without any changes to Brightkite. I like to share where I’m at, find out if anyone I know is near-by, and show people what it looks like where I be. If the pesto rocks? I’ll post a note. I don’t need to be the damned mayor or some place and get a cookie dangled at me on my phone for it. I don’t need a badge, I don’t need a sticker. I like community, I want community, and LBS, for me? Is about the people. Simple as that.