Brightkite is one of those location-based social net services, the ones where you “check in” at places and see where other people check in. It’s like Gowalla and Foursquare, except (IMO) not quite as good.

The one compelling feature of Brightkite, however, is group SMS. It allows users to create an SMS “party line”, which works with any SMS-capable phone. Chatters don’t even have to be part of the service - they can simply be invited by phone number.

This, however, creates weird Brightkite “garbage” accounts (my term), which creates issues when that phone number goes and becomes a full-blown Brightkite member. In my family’s little group text, for example, there’s one of these garbage accounts which corresponds to a phone number that is now a number associated with a real Brightkite account. But other than polluting our chat’s user list, this is mostly harmless.

Less harmless is the fact that the friends list appears completely broken. My wife and I, for example, just sat next to each other, on our respective MacBooks, typing in each other’s username and real names, trying to pull up each other’s profile so that we can friend each other.

Every search, zero hits.

We were finally able to figure out that we could see each other’s profile by clicking on each other’s name in the group chat userlist. However, when we attempted to friend each other, the service said that we’re already friends.

Yet, when we look at our own friends list, neither of us appear on the other’s friend list.

This is just the latest way in which Brightkite has shown itself to me to be a bit of a wreck. Unfortunately, I have found no other service that gives us the ability to do this sort of group SMS that works with any SMS user (we’ve found things that work with all iPhones, for example, but my parents aren’t on iPhones yet. If anyone knows of other services that do this, please let me know).

Brightkite: For God’s Sake, Sort Yourself Out.