Review: BrightKit Promising But Not Fully Baked

Last week, I looked at five different tools to manage multiple Twitter accounts – something that’s becoming increasingly necessary as Twitter becomes a personal and professional service.

There’s a brand new player in the multi-account game called BrightKit, which shows some promise but, unfortunately, lacks many features that would let it go head-to-head with SplitTweet, which I consider to be the leading multi-account service.

BrightKit’s biggest shortcoming is you can’t see your Twitter stream, which means you’ve got to use a Twitter client or Twitter.com to take in the action. This leaves BrightKit as just a publishing tool, which puts it on the same level as EasyTweets but behind Matt and Digsby.

My take is BrightKit, which was developed by Vancouver-based Invoke Media, either got released into beta without being fully baked, or it’s meant to be a corporate publishing tool with some frills such as statistics, which are “coming soon”.

To give you a sense of BrightKit, let’s take a walk-through.

1. Adding accounts is fast and simple. All you do is enter your Twitter username and password; and then rinse and repeat to add additional ones. Right now, it’s BrightKit’s strength.

2. The Dashboard: It features a nice, user-friendly layout. If BrightKit introduced some more features, you could see how the dashboard has good potential to become the heart of your Twitter activity.

3. Writing a Tweet: A good, clean interface with solid features, including a URL shortening tool and the ability to post-date posts. It would be better if the default was “Now” rather than “Later” given the vast majority of Twitter posts are done on the fly as opposed to scheduled in the future.

One nice feature is the ability to add additional users to BrightKit, and give them access to the Twitter accounts. This would be a particularly useful feature for businesses that may have several people on their Twitter account.

Bottom Line: BrightKit has the potential to become a useful tool. The introduction of a Twitter stream is a must-have, otherwise BrightKit isn’t going to get much traction.

More: While I believe BrightKit misses the mark right now, Mashable was far more enthusiastic, describing BrightKit as the “sleekest” tool for scheduling future tweets, shortening URLs, and tracking click-thrus.

Technorati Tags: brightkit, matt, splittweet, twitter

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