Twitter, BrightKite, FriendFeed, and IWantSandy

I've run across a few new (to me at least) online services lately, and I thought I'd talk a bit about what they do for you, and what I like about them. All of these services are free, and I don't think any of them took more than 5 minutes to sign up, so give them a try if they sound interesting.

Twitter

Andy got me hooked on Twitter about a year ago, and I use it quite a bit. I have a hard time explaining what I like about it, but the basic idea is that you can post short updates ("tweets"), and they are broadcast to anyone who is following your feed. The idea is pretty simple, but since it is so loosely defined, a lot of different uses have emerged. My circle of Twitter friends uses it somewhat like a persistent chat room, so there ends up being quite a bit of back-and-forth conversation. A lot of people use it as a micro-blog, throwing links up as they see them. Also, quite a few conferences are using it as a simple way to throw together a news feed without having to set up an RSS feed: here's MOSSCamp and MIX08.

BrightKite

BrightKite takes the Twitter idea a bit further. Rather than just allowing textual posts, BrightKite lets you "check in" at a specific location, and ties your posts to that location until you check in somewhere else. They also let you post photos, which is kinda cool, especially since they are automatically geolocated using your last check-in. On the backend, they run your check-ins through a geocoder (basically a web service that looks up addresses and place names and returns lat/long, geonames.org is a good one.), and store your current location. There is an iPhone app that was just released that takes care of checking in for you, but there are some fairly nifty things you can do even if you don't care to shell out for an iPhone. You can use SMS to check in: just text @ to their service, and it will check you in. If you're out at a restaurant, and want to check in, you can text ? and BrightKite will respond with a list of possibilities near your last check-in.

I like the idea that your location is an implicit part of each post, rather than having to be encoded in the message. Both Twitter and BrightKite have a 140 character limit on posts, so handling locations behind the scenes saves some overhead. BrightKite seems like a small improvement in functionality over Twitter, but I'll be interested to see where people take it once the BrightKite developers open up their API.

FriendFeed

Twitter and BrightKite both provide a new channel for publishing information. FriendFeed is a bit different. FriendFeed consumes feeds from your other online identities (Pandora, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger, etc.), and re-publishes the data through a uniform presentation layer. There isn't any huge technical leap there, although pulling disparate data feeds into a single application is non-trivial... The thing that they did right was to make it really easy to add common services. I know I never remember to check my friends' Flickr feeds. Even if they Twitter that they posted, I rarely click through. FriendFeed puts everything in a single place, and I like that.

I Want Sandy

I saved my favorite for last. I don't remember how I stumbled on to it, (possibly BrightKite -> GetSatisfaction -> IWantSandy) but it has made my life easier. I Want Sandy is an email-based personal assistant that will remember appointments, to-do lists, and notes for you. Once you sign up, you get a unique email address that you can use to send in things you want to have remembered. There is some rudimentary text processing going on, so if you send "Remind me to mail that package tomorrow", you'll get a reminder at 7:00 in your email the next day. Everything can be manipulated via email, Twitter, and SMS, so you don't actually need to sign in to the web site to retrieve information. My short-term memory has been entirely replaced by plots from Stargate SG-1 episodes, plural forms in languages which I don't speak, and the Dewey Decimal number for American Fiction (813.54), so I find it incredibly useful to get a text message on my way home from work reminding me to pick up the mail.
I can't really explain how useful I find I Want Sandy. I think you just have to try it out to see if it works for you.