I love using BrightKite, the best location based social network in the land.  They have done some really smart things, like focus intensely on privacy and introducing ‘always not public’ location checkins.

Today, I read about another fantastic little tweak, via Colin:

Brightkite knows how their user’s are using the system.  An example of this was brought to my attention by my coworker Kyle Slattery.  He told me about Brightkite’s ability to detect when a user does not exist on Brightkite, but may exist on Twitter.

Brightkite and Twitter share the same prefix for username detection, the @ symbol¹.  Since Brightkite knows that some people use their system as a geo-enabled Twitter client, like I explained the other day, sometimes you’ll find people “talking” to or about people that do not yet have a Brightkite account. Kyle gave me the example of the username @mikemangino.  That username does not exist on Brightkite but it does on Twitter.

So when you look for a user on brightkite that is on twitter but not brightkite, it looks like this:

And a bit more:

It is a great example of how Brightkite is continuously showing themselves to be “in touch” with how people use their system which makes Brightkite a joy to use.

Great little Easter egg, what others are out there?