Brightkite, one of the first players in the mobile check-in craze, has decided to abandon that business to the likes of Facebook and Foursquare. Instead, the company said Monday, that it would be focusing its attention toward group texting, a space also occupied by VC darling GroupMe and bootstrapped FastSociety.

Brightkite, which bills itself as a service for keeping tabs on what your friends are doing and discovering new places, introduced location-based check-ins for mobile phones in 2007. The service was simple, much like Google’s Dodgeball attempt a couple of years earlier, letting users share their favorite locations from their GPS-enabled smart phones. Brightkite also introduced badges, or small rewards for the people who checked in to certain places at certain times, just like rival Foursquare.

“These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them,” the Brightkite team said in a blog post.

Brightkite’s new ambition is to be the text messaging service of record for all mobile phones, complete with group texting abilities. Group texting is already proving to be a hit with venture investors. New York-based service GroupMe recently found itself in the middle of a VC bidding war, giving it a valuation of about $35 million. Brightkite’s new app for Android phones rolls out this week, and includes groups, photo, and location sharing.

Check-in services will start to disappear on Dec. 17 from Brightkite’s apps and Web sites. The company is allowing users to back up their old posts and check-ins until Dec. 31.

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What did Dodgeball.com do? Well pretty much the same thing Brightkite.com does: let’s you know where people in your network are located. The benefit of BrightKite.com is when you check in to the system with your location, you are occasionally notified if there are other people in your network within a given radius. I tried it out but unfortunately when I tried to check in for the first time via text, I couldn’t figure out what to type. It didn’t understand what I was typing in.

I think that was more of me not understanding how the system works but honestly it should have been able to find the restaurant I was at by me providing the restaurant name, city and state. One of the major downfalls of DodgeBall.com previously was that it didn’t work for cities that were more spread out. Perhaps that was because there weren’t enough people in the network.

Whatever the reason was, Brightkite could very well suffer the same fate as Dodgeball. The founders don’t seem to think so though. Nor do the investors in the company. This is another company that has come out of the Denver area and was part of the highly successful TechStars program. My guess is that this team has a good chance of success but I’m still not sure how they’ll solve the problem of wide spanning cities.

One last challenge that I see for this company is the problem of dealing with large convention centers and college campuses. We want to be able to specify our location within areas that share the same address. Ultimately, my guess is that they’ll eventually integrate GPS into the phone. Have you used the program? Do you find a lot of utility in it?

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