PresenceRouter = Plazes + Brightkite

Now that Brightkite has an API, I took a few hours tonight baking Brightkite support into PresenceRouter, and I just released version 2.93. Brightkite has a somewhat different object model than Plazes does:

• Communities, street addresses and “places” all map to their own Brightkite location ID; for example:
  • Charlottetown
  • 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown
  • Reinvented Office at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown
• You “check in” to a Brightkite location, which is simply a geopresence timestamp without accompanying text or status message.
• With or without “checking in” you can “post a note” to a Brightkite location, which is like setting a Plazes status message when you plaze yourself.

As such, the PresenceRouter-Brightkite connection grabs the current status message and Plaze from Plazes.com, then searches for the applicable Brightkite location ID, posts a check-in, and then posts a note with the Plazes status message.

Because this is all done in AppleScript I haven’t, for the moment, attempted to use Brightkite’s OAuth support (PresenceRouter does use OAuth for Fire Eagle authentication, but Fire Eagle supports the PLAINTEXT signature method, whereas Brightkite only supports HMAC-SHA1, which requires some signing voodoo that requires some additional heavy AppleScript lifting). Because of this, and because Brightkite doesn’t seem to support HTTPS, for the time being the Brightkite username and password are sent using HTTP Basic Authentication.

I have a few Brightkite invites available if anyone wants to experience the wonder of all of this first-hand.