Brightkite is a new site to me that is quickly becoming one of my new favorite sites out there. It’s basically a Twitter clone that allows you to “check in” where ever you are. I find myself using it more than Twitter lately. In fact, I can even update my Twitter feed through BrightKite.

It will tell me who is within a certain radius of me and what they are doing. Users also can upload pictures of these places and anything else that happens. But the best feature is its SMS capabilities. I can sent BrightKite a text message with “@ home” and it will check me in at the location I have marked as my home. I can do the same thing for work too. I can also take a picture, attach that picture to an email with the subject line of what I’m doing and send it to a special BrightKite email address and it will add that picture to that location with whatever I said along with it.

It’s a really cool site, still in beta so you have to get invited to get in. I have 2 invites left so if you want one, let me know. Also, check out my profile here.

Update: I have a total of 5 BrightKite updates to give away now thanks to the awesome people there.

Popularity: 51% [?]

About a year ago, I wrote that I was checking out the latest and greatest Web 2.0 tool out there, Twitter. Well everyone said it was so great but I wasn’t sure. I gave it a good run but eventually it just died out and i went months without even thinking about it. But recently, I decided to go back and check it out.

I’ve had some friends recently get involved with Twitter so I think that helped me go back. So I started writing what I was doing, or feeling, or just whatever. So it’s been probably 2 weeks that I’ve been back to using it and I have to say that this time is much better than before.

One main reason is the fact that I have several friends who use it now and it’s fun to pseudo-chat over it as we have done a few times. I also have it hooked up to my phone so that I can send and receive messages via text message on my Twitter account. I also have it on my iPod Touch. Makes it so I can have access to Twitter basically whenever I want.

So check me out. Here’s my Twitter page:

http://twitter.com/digijustin

Follow me and then you can have another insight in what makes me tick.

Popularity: 33% [?]

The couple of weeks ago, I see a link on Digg about a cool new online storage site called Dropbox. I click it since it’s the top one at that time and was amazed at what I found. It is a revolutionary new way of online storage. If you’ve worked with Subversion, you’ll find that some of its features are in Dropbox. Basically, it acts like this:

• You install their software on any machine you use and it will set up a folder in your My Documents folder called My Dropbox.
• On the web site, you add that computer to your account by name (i.e. My Work Computer).
• You can then copy any file or folder into your My Dropbox folder and it will upload to their web site what was in that folder.
• Go to another of your computers with Dropbox installed and open your Dropbox folder and it will get those new files or folders off of their site automatically.
• If you make a change to a file in your My Dropbox folder, it will be uploaded upon saving and the old version will be stored if you ever would like to revert back to it.
• You can also share folders with anyone else. For example, if you and a friend are working on a job together, you can both place assets up there to use but make it private for just those on the project.

I am really excited about this site. Not very often am I blown away by a new Web 2.0 application but I really think that this one is great in all senses. Unfortunately they do not have a way to invite people but once they do and I get some, I’ll post that I have those available. But do what I did and just hit up Google and do a search for “Drop Box Invites” and see what happens.

Popularity: 44% [?]