I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.
Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:
- Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
- Click the Mobile tab
- Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
- On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
- In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
- Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
- @placemark or @full address to check-in
- !message to post a message and attach it to your current location
Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.
Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.