Brightkite has been one of the major players in the location-based social networking game for a while now. Originally a TechStars startup, the company was bought in April by Limbo, with the goal of merging the two location services. Since that time however, Brightkite has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new early-adopter favorite, Foursquare. But now Brightkite looks ready to strike back at the competition with Brightkite 2.0.
It’s not entirely clear when Brightkite 2.0 will launch, but indications are that it will be soon. Users have been receiving notices about it. We’ve obtained a whole bunch of screenshots purported to be of the new version. We’ve reached out to the company to verify these, but they definitely look legitimate.
So what’s new? The first thing you’ll notice is that the whole look and feel of the site has been revamped. Gone is a lot of the clutter that distracts from the main location feed. This has been replaced by a revamped top toolbar, and a new bottom toolbar (think: Facebook).
Filters are a key part of Brightkite now. Rather than having three different main streams (Me & My Friends, Around Me, Universe), there is now one with a few different filters. There are also new filters to sort through people using the service by factors like location, sex, and age.
Checking-in has been simplified, as has adding a new place. And Brightkite 2.0 promises simplified privacy settings so you can more easily set where to send you updates (to the public, or just your friends — to Twitter and/or Facebook).
Also new is the ability to “like” other people’s updates. Obviously, this is similar to the functionality found on FriendFeed and Facebook.
But the biggest change to Brightkite is that it is going asynchronous. That is to say, rather than forcing you to accept a friend request to enable other people to see you updates, those people can now simply follow you without any confirmation needed, like on Twitter. They will become your “Fans” while people you also follow back are your “Friends”.
This is an interesting move since Brightkite is a location-based service, and privacy remains the main issue for why all services, like Facebook, don’t switch to this model.
Below, find more screenshots.
Whoaa!! seems a lot like weegoh
Excellent… Brightkite has been way under valued / utilized from an interaction standpoint. It may even ‘augment that reality’ as some point then… I hope their iPhone apps get faster cos it’s slow slow slow.
AWESOME!!! cant wait! Thanks Brightkite!!!
oh and any Layar stuff being added?
My main concern is whether you will be able to set your updates to private, still allowing you to approve people who follow you. I actually prefer the existing “friends” set up on Brightkite and am a bit leery of that changing.
Nice!
I like the dislike functionality… reminds me of http://www.Strands.com 
Beautiful! And finally a service to implement negative voting (thumbs down, dislike, whatever they call it)!
Looking forward to the BK 2.0!
does anyone actually use Brightkite on their PC? I am all mobile on these types of services.
“Asynchronous” is not the good word here… I was confused for a while.
Asymmetric maybe?
Its pretty cool, but I still use hummba.com with my Nokia. The website and app functionality are alot easier.
Hey Techcrunch, pay attention! Brightkite has been down for most of the past three days because they botched their upgrade. There’s a ‘Upgrade FAIL’ story waiting to be written!