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Social Media suicide - Brightkite edition
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Via Brightkite.com
I am a huge advocate of Brightkite.com.Brightkite is one of those services that just draws me in. I have even written several posts here for promoting the service and tips on how to use it better. But over the last month the service has become quite unstable. I would say I was seeing their error page more than I saw Twitters fail whale last year. But that is just to prepare you for the worst.
Last week the people at Brightkite announced that they would be going offline for a little bit to do system updates. Their blog post about the downtime talked about new features. Well the update time ended up being 12 + hours. When every thing came back online there was nothing new. I could accept that. Others where quite angry though. They Brightkite posted a link to a techcrunch article showing off some of the new features. Fast forward just a couple of days and with out any notice the service was down again! Once again after well over 12 hours the site was back up with new features. Most where happy, though the UI had changed quite a bit. Then not long after we started hearing off problems. Friend updates were not showing up in your stream, comments were vanishing, some posts never made it to see light. But worse of, privacy features were rendered useless. Users that take full advantage of Brightkites privacy tools were shocked to find out that their posts had gone public. Worse yet, many of these posts had already been crawled by googles bots and cached and are now searchable on google! Brightkite is currently as of this posting down again and has been for the last 24 hours.
This whole situation sucks. I love(d) Brightkite. But they rushed out an update that was not ready. The reasoning behind rushing out this update is unknown. It could be the fact that techcrunch published the article about Brightkite 2.0 or that some users kept bugging them about the updates. Either way it was a bad move. This update should have been given to a select few to fully beta test for a few months to get all those privacy bugs worked out. They have users that are willing to beta test for them too. I have done beta testing of their iPhone app. Instead they have possibly commited social media suicide and we may not hear to much more from them in the future, I know quite a few people that are most likely leaving the service do to their screw up.
