As many as I’m a part of, I was always a little wary of social networks. I use a number of them, but I’m not really involved in any of them. I love Last.fm and how easy it was to upload tracks played from Amarok. I love seeing the statistics and recommendations, but I’ve never really made an effort to connect with other people. While I couldn’t see a use for it at first, I really enjoyed using Twitter to write random thoughts. Again, I rarely try and connect with people. I thought I’d like using Jaiku as it was like Twitter, but with some location features. It was a bit cumbersome to use and most people using it didn’t use English.
I’ve found that I really like BrightKite. I’m usually not up to anything exciting, but I think it’s interesting to track where I’ve been. I think it’s useful for motivation to try new things. Using the site has been really easy, even from a cell phone. My only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to recognize a lot of businesses, particularly ones located within strip malls. It’s easy from the web, but if you’re out and about it’s a pain to send text messages back and forth to the site. I also really enjoy looking at the Universe tab. I love seeing little random things going on around the world.
I think it’d be interesting to run into other BrightKiters, but there aren’t a ton of people around my areas, conceding that the site is still in a beta version. I haven’t told anyone I know in real life as I’m too embarrassed. Not really sure why. I’ve always been very reserved and I’ve always kept all the little facets of my life separate from each other.