On Brightkite, ladies' night never ends
Whereas most new technologies tend to favor the early adopter -- a generally male-skewed, try-everything, fad-friendly crowd -- Linner is focusing on a different audience: hot girls.
"Guys will go where the hot chicks are," Linner said over lunch a few months ago. "The target demographic is a girl in college," he reiterated in a recent phone interview.
How do you get girls in high demand to cozy up to a social network that asks users to pull out their phones and check in multiple times a day? Linner employs what he calls "the ladies' night approach."
"Bars do things to make women come there -- reduced-price drinks or free drinks," he said. "So we do things in our system to make it more inviting to women."
Brightkite's landing page is bubbly and colorful with cute cartoon characters and an emphasis on words like "simplicity."
Compare that to competing location-based network Loopt, with its shiny, sleek buttons and big map overlaid with widgets. Or the smaller but much-hyped website Foursquare, which is quick to highlight that it plays nicely with high-end smart phones.
When adding new features, Linner and his 32 or so employees have to take care not to tick off Brightkite's pioneering female users.
For example . . .