According to the Brightkite blog, yesterday evening 3rd party developer Chris Hallgrenopened the source code for his Brightkite BlackBerry application (Brightberry). Denver-based Brightkite is best known as the mobile social application that integrates with Facebook and Twitter to let users check in, find friends and discover the history of the places they frequent.
After launching their iPhone application in October 2008, we named it the Most Promising Company of 2008. And while it’s no small feat to impress the ReadWriteWeb team, the service’s growth potential appears endless with one in three smartphone owners already using location-based services. It’s not surprising that Blackberry users have eagerly anticipated Brightberry since App World first launched.
Chris Hallgren’s first efforts at Brightberry allowed users to share locations and place marks, monitor friends, send messages and post comments. However, the app still lacked the capabilities and sex appeal of its iPhone predecessor. Following the Linus’ Law tenet, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, Hallgren hopes that by making his app open source, he’ll gain a better user interface, improved load times, photo uploading, friend requests, place mark creation and place streams. Other location-based Blackberry apps with similar functionality include Loopt and Buzzd.
Brightberry is available in its current iteration at bbhn.mobi or if you’re a developer and you’d like to help Hallgren do some of the heavy lifting, check out the GitHub project profile.
