Getting Brightkite and Verizon to Play Nicely
After hearing all about Brightkite from Brandice and Colin, I decided to take the plunge and try out the service a few weeks ago. In the time since, I’ve become addicted to the service, and I’m constantly amazed at how well thought out the site is. One thing that really bugged me, though, is that Brightkite doesn’t work with Verizon text messages. After being initially disheartened, I found getting around the issue to be pretty easy: instead of text messages, I used PIX messages.
If you take a look at Brightkite’s SMS Guide when logged into the service, you’ll notice a email under “Post a photo to a place.” This is the email you’ll be sending your updates to. To use any of the mobile commands (PDF) with Verizon, just send a PIX message to the email address without a photo attached. Put your command in the “text” field, send the message, and you should be good to go.
A word of caution: if you don’t have unlimited picture messaging, this method may end up being very costly. I’m not sure if Verizon still charges their PIX rate for messages without pictures, but if they do, make sure you’re not going over your allotted number of messages.
Hopefully, Verizon will fix whatever issue is breaking the Brightkite integration soon, so we don’t have to continue to hack around the problem. In the meantime, however, this method should continue to work; I haven’t had any issues with it thus far.
3 Comments
Brian Layman 09 Aug 2008 at 2:35PM
Posting works fine through your phones web browser too via http://i.brightkite.com or http://m.brightkite.com AND if you have email on your phone that works great for Placemarks AND photos.
Cheers!
Colin Devroe 19 Aug 2008 at 8:31AM
Not being a cellular network aficionado I do not know what is the hold up on Verizon working with Brightkite, nor who is to blame, but I find it weird that any network would have difficulty sending SMS messages from one to another.
Another way around it would be to build your own script to publish to Brightkite, now that the API is out and about.
Kyle 19 Aug 2008 at 12:17PM
Colin: From what I’ve read, the fault lies with Verizon. About 3 months ago, they said they were going to add Brightkite support, but (obviously) they haven’t yet. Yet another reason why a switch to AT&T and an iPhone is in order…