Webware

AUSTIN, Texas--There's Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, FourSquare, Rummble, uLocate, Google Latitude, Yahoo Fire Eagle, and goodness knows which other ones we haven't heard of yet. The location-based mobile networking space has been front and center at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival as hundreds of tech enthusiasts from around the country have been eager to find their friends and learn what's happening.

Perhaps it's fitting that in one of the festival's last panels on Tuesday afternoon, a handful of executives and high-level developers from the location-awareness space got together for a discussion called "Using GPS and Location to Enhance Social Networking." The big question: Do all these disparate services have to get interoperable?

Moderator Tom Marchioro, the location-based services architect at GPS navigation company Garmin, brought up an analogy to text messaging and Web-based IM, two early social-media technolgoies that took very different routes.

After years of carrier restriction, text messages "came up with a standard, and last year there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent worldwide, and it's a total cash cow," Marchioro said. "Internet messaging, 10 to 15 years after it was invented...is a bunch of independent networks and there's no monetization model. So that would argue that if we're going to have a bunch of location-based social networks, they might want to interoperate."

One panelist, Bryan Jones of Mobile Blast, brought up the OSLO Accord, a project raised at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which hopes to bring an OpenID-like standard to location sharing.

Not all the panelists seemed to be on board.

"We would love to be able to work with the other social networks out there, (but) some of the challenge with that is that your social graphs tend to be very different across different social networks," said Martin May, founder of Brightkite.

John Adams, from Twitter's operations team and who hinted that the microblogging service "hopes to have more services that are location-based in the future," said that it could be technically difficult as well. "Different services have different methods for identifying, storing, and locating different privacy data," he said. "With Brightkite, they have a much higher level of granularity around your location data...and it's very different to translate that between both systems."

There's really not a clear answer. And the entrance of two huge tech players into the space--Google's Latitude and Yahoo's Fire Eagle--has given location-based networking some validation. It's also possible that one of them will be the company to come up with the standard that will help level the playing field and allow different services to coexist much like cell carriers in the text-messaging space. Or, perhaps location-based networking will better mirror microblogging: a few years ago, there were several competing services like Pownce and Jaiku in addition to Twitter that are now either defunct or effectively afterthoughts.

One more thing on a slightly unrelated note: Adams did touch upon the "How is Twitter going to make money?" question. "We are looking at commercial accounts. We see a lot of potential in adding that service that (lets) you know you're talking to Shaq or that you know you're talking to a certain celebrity, and to weed out impersonation," he said, "without imposing fees on existing free services."

Breaking: Twitter to start selling "I'm Famous For Real" badges! Money problem solved!

AUSTIN, Texas--A couple of days ago I wrote a story suggesting that the Twitter saturation level here at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival was so high that the service's value was being affected.

Now, after four full days here, I think that conclusion is worth a reality check: Twitter is out-and-out dominating SXSWi.

To be sure, the massive numbers of tweets that are being posted using the "#sxsw" tag is making it more difficult for those using Twitter to find specific information than was the case at SXSWi 2007 or SXSWi 2008. But the reality is, if you're part of the conference this year, it feels very much like you simply cannot do anything, go anywhere, talk to anyone, see any panel or have a meal without Twitter having played a role.

From the 32bit party Monday night to people's reactions to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling's annual SXSWi rant to alerts of free ice cream being handed out on the streets of Austin, the collective agenda is being directed in 140-character bursts, even if it takes a little more work to find out what you want to find out.

Add that to the fact that the iPhone has proven a magical and nearly ubiquitous device on which to conduct that 140-character orchestra, and you've got a seriously hard-to-topple-off-the-throne combination.

Of course, there are many other communications media at play here. Besides the introduction of FourSquare, the launch of iPhone interactivity for Facebook Connect and other social networking services like Britekite, Whrrl and Meebo, there's certainly been no shortage of e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and, believe it or not, phone calls.

But through it all, Twitter is the backbone. It is the organizing principle of SXSWi. And while the SXSWi crowd would seem to be the vanguard of this level of all-encompassing Twitter devotion, it is clear that this is just the proving ground for what will be coming for many other parts of connected society.

After all, just a year ago, nearly all of the most-followed Twitter users were members of the digerati. Now, it's nearly all mainstream celebrities or personalities. Can Twitter handle this? I don't think anyone knows.

But what I'm seeing here at SXSWi is that the service, even without a developed revenue stream and even with a recent history of functional instability and even with so much traffic that it can simply be overwhelming, has become indispensable. Take Twitter away from the crowd here suddenly, and I think the conference would grind to a halt.

It would recover, and pretty quickly. This is an resourceful group of people. There are other options. No one should believe for a minute that the advent of Twitter or other social media neuters the digerati's ability to communicate with traditional analog tools. But if Twitter were suddenly gone, there would be one heck of a hiccup.

Last year, I wrote that despite many companies' desire to repeat the incredible debut Twitter had at SXSWi 2007, there was no denying that Twitter circa 2008 was the new Twitter.

And despite my misgivings about what is clearly a saturation problem, I have to conclude that here in Austin, in 2009, Twitter is once again the new Twitter.

Here's to FourSquare! Former Dodgeball loyalists gather poolside at SXSWi to celebrate the new app.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a cowboy hat, Texas-flag swim trunks, and his trademark hipster glasses--raised a drink and said, "Here's to FourSquare!"

I'm biased. We all were. The iPhone-centric FourSquare has been a project near and dear to our hearts in the New York tech scene, as many of us were loyal users of Dodgeball, the service that Crowley built as a graduate-school thesis and sold to Google in 2005. In January, Google announced that it would be shutting the service down amid budget cuts, and Crowley (along with co-developer Naveen Selvadurai) got cranking on its successor so that they could debut it in time for SXSWi. I was an alpha tester, as were most of those at the impromptu pool party.

If the number of FourSquare friend requests in my in-box are any indication, it's been a hit this week. While it hasn't been as buzzworthy as the then-new Twitter was at SXSWi '07, it's undoubtedly one of the things that people will be talking about when they return home from Austin later this week. And if it goes as Crowley and Selvadurai hope, they'll keep using it, too.

Like Dodgeball (and other location-based mobile applications like Whrrl, Brightkite, and Loopt), FourSquare lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare uses GPS on the iPhone (an SMS code and a mobile Web site is available for other devices, but apps for Android, BlackBerry and the like are down the pipeline) and lets users rack up points and badges for awarding nightlife habits and accomplishments.

"Naveen and I had been kicking around these ideas for a while, since last summer, and then nothing was seriously built until, I guess, that night that we were all at Lock's (that'd be Curbed founder and prolific Dodgeball user Lockhart Steele) birthday party and the rumor started spreading that Dodgeball was getting shut down," Crowley said. "We started to talk (about how) we've really got to build this thing because it's going to be turned off."

FourSquare was built in a matter of weeks, because Crowley and Selvadurai wanted to be able to roll it out in time for SXSWi. "It is, admittedly a little bit sloppy, and it's buggy, and people call us out and say we launched too soon," Crowley said of the occasional slip-ups and outages for FourSquare, which went live in the iTunes App Store less than 24 hours before SXSWi kicked off.. "The goal was to launch here and have people take it back to wherever they live."

Now, they're literally building the application in the SXSWi petri dish, a massive gathering of digital-media's early adopters and innovators who are all eager to socialize and navigate the labyrinthine Austin party scene. Special "badges" have been created for SXSWi. On Monday morning, I earned my "Panel Nerd" badge for spending what FourSquare deems to be too much time at the Austin Convention Center. (Message to my editors: Take note of this!)

He said that while user interest has been through the roof, investors--FourSquare is currently self-funded and run out of Crowley's apartment as well as a number of East Village coffee shops--have been quieter. "I haven't really seen any investors here, to be honest," he said. I've been getting e-mails from a few people, but I haven't run into anyone in the halls or anything." He'll probably need that if FourSquare gets much bigger just to keep its servers afloat. But with penny-pinching the inevitable VC habit du jour, it could take some work.

Crowley also laughed off a Gawker report that Google's lawyers were about to start breathing down his neck over the similarities between Dodgeball and FourSquare--even though Google has launched its own location-aware platform, Latitude.

When Crowley and Selvadurai return to New York later this week, they'll have a lot to do. FourSquare users at SXSWi have been blunt, sending out Twitter messages pointing out bugs and asking when there will be better features to find their friends, like an address-book import function. They'll have to figure out some way to control users attempting to game the system, something that Crowley says has already popped up, and work on building a FourSquare presence in other cities. Right now there are 12, including Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Plus, location-based mobile networking is a hot space. Competitors like Brightkite and Whrrl are better-established, bolstered by investor money, and have already worked in features like Facebook Connect integration. Crowley and Selvadurai have some catching up to do.

They'll also have to deal with what happens when they use FourSquare to "check in" to downtown pizzerias and I show up to steal their food. Just sayin'.

Guess what isn't super-sized? Digital distribution revenues for filmmakers, apparently.

AUSTIN, Texas--The Internet and the rise of online video have meant a plethora of new options for independent filmmakers. But, as has been well-publicized, the money just isn't there yet. A panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday highlighted that this is an extremely contentious issue.

"Digital distribution is not some magic bullet," said panelist Gary Hustwit on the success of his documentary "Helvetica," in front of a packed room of audience members that came from both SXSWi and its sister festival, SXSW Film. "It's not that because the film is available digitally it does well. It's because you do the work...because of that exposure, it did well."

In spite of widespread blog speculation that DVDs are dying and that digital downloads and streams will replace the physical medium in due time, filmmakers say that from the creative side, relying on these outlets--iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Joost, and SnagFilms, represented on the panel by CEO Rick Allen--simply is not profitable yet. In fact, in many cases, sales and revenue numbers are kept on the down-low.

Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian behind "Super Size Me" and "Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?," put it bluntly. "The reason numbers aren't released (for digital distribution revenues) is because the numbers are pathetic," he said. "The numbers are sadly low in comparison to what we expect from film and television."

"If you're looking to pay your rent, not so much, if you're looking to pay your phone bill, you have a great chance," Spurlock continued. "It's getting to a point where it's down the road from being profitable, but we're just not at that point yet."

The panelists disagreed over whether the best digital distribution strategy is to get a film on as many platforms as possible or to be strategic in the hopes of making more money.

Matt Dentler of digital representation group Cinetic Rights Management argued for the be-everywhere model. "We are a direct aggregator to, I would say, about a dozen portals in the U.S., and we just closed our first couple of deals in Europe." Dentler said that Cinetic's films go to YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, SnagFilms, and quite a few others. "We're probably going to have about five to ten more in Europe over the next few months...what this touches on is there are so many freaking options out there for consumers that you kind of have to provide all of them."

But Steve Savage, president of distributor New Video, disagreed. "It's good to be agnostic, and I think it's a good way to put everything out there and see what sticks but there's also other ways to do it," he asserted, "to be really strategic, to find where the money is."

The panelists seemed to agree that, as so many people have said before, digital revenues are on the way. "The money you're going to make as an independent filmmaker right now," Dentler said, "the fact that we can start cutting checks for people today, it might not be huge checks, but at least they're checks."

"They don't approach TV license fees," SnagFilms' Allen said. "We are at the front end of this. However, they are hundredfold, a thousandfold, the size of the checks that most independent documentarians have received from theatrical release."

Gary Hustwit said that filmmakers need to take responsibility for pushing the digital distribution business forward themselves. "Go directly to the audience instead of relying on, with all due respect to the distributors here, other businesses to do it," he suggested. "Why are we building other people's businesses when we could build our own businesses?"

AUSTIN, Texas--By now, the story of how Twitter exploded onto the scene at the 2007 South by Southwest festival is legend in technology circles.

But here at SXSW 2009, the notion of the perfect match among community, service, and event seems flipped on its head. Many people are discovering that a monumental oversaturation of tweets is reversing the value that Twitter offered at SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008 for finding friends and great parties.

At SXSW, the standard is for everyone to include the tag "#sxsw" in their tweets. For example, on Friday, I was looking for sources for a different story and tweeted, "If you are launching an iPhone app at #sxsw, or know someone who is, please let me know. Thanks!"

That's a great convention because it allows anyone wanting to know what's going on to search Twitter for posts using any search term important to them. That has proven useful for people wanting to find out what's going on after earthquakes, the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Hudson River airplane crash, and many other events. At SXSW in 2007 and 2008, this was a big part of how people navigated their experiences.

At a conference with scores of panels and seemingly just as many parties, being able to determine what's worthwhile is crucial for people trying to get the most out of their time here.

This year because of the conference's impressive growth and Twitter's broader mainstream appeal, it has become almost impossible to find the same value as in the past. I did a search for the "#sxsw" tag on Saturday afternoon and found that there had been 392 tweets with the term in just the previous 10 minutes. That number mushroomed to more than 1,500 in the previous hour.

There were nearly 400 tweets using the #sxsw tag in just 10 minutes during the SXSW conference on Saturday afternoon.

(Credit: Twitter)

While those numbers demonstrate that people here are without question using Twitter like never before, it also means that it's never been harder to find what you're looking for amid the flood of posts about the panels, barbecue, Web celebrity spottings, and deep thoughts about social media.

This has forced people accustomed to relying on simple Twitter searches to get creative to find the nuggets they need.

"I've been purposefully putting the ("#sxsw") tag...to as many things as I can, even just going to my hotel," said David Kadavy, a user-interface designer from Chicago. "I started looking (for the tag) at first. But there was just so much of it that I started just looking (for) the people I'm following and filtering for the (tag)."

That's fine for people who are sitting at a computer, but many people using Twitter at SXSW do so on mobile phones. And being the cutting edge of the digerati set, the most common device in evidence here is the iPhone. But Kadavy said he hadn't found a way to do the kind of filtered search he wanted, and as a result, seemed hard-pressed to accomplish what he'd need to while on the go.

Some at the conference have found themselves being aware of the oversaturation dynamic and have been trying to reduce the number of tagged tweets, hoping to cut down on the flow.

"I was definitely guilty yesterday," said Andie Grace, a senior staffer with the Burning Man organization. "I grabbed my phone to tweet that I was grabbing my luggage (at the airport)....But I stopped myself from Twittering and I thought if everybody did this, it's going to be useless. So I stopped myself because I would like to search and see what panels my friends are finding interesting and where they're planning to be."

To be sure, there are plenty of ways people can see what their friends are tweeting. But the never-ending flow of tweets with the "#sxsw" tag are forcing attendees to find alternatives.

That, of course, has presented opportunities to other services to gain the kind of passionate users that Twitter engendered during SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008. In fact, some services are even incorporating Twitter, creating a way to get the best of both worlds.

"I just got (to SXSW) but have been watching from afar, and it did seem a little crowded," said Mario Anima, the director of online community at Current.com. "It seems like (a lot of) people are also using Brightkite and Foursquare to keep in touch."

Anima said that Foursquare, a brand-new service from the team that created--and then sold to Google--Dodgeball, is particularly useful for navigating SXSW because it allows people to post updates about what they're doing and where they're going that are then incorporated into their Twitter feeds. That way, their Twitter followers can see what they're doing without also being a Foursquare member.

Of course, SXSW 2009 may well prove to be where Foursquare itself explodes, a la Twitter in 2007. The service was under wraps until just a few days ago, and its iPhone application was added to Apple's App Store just in time for the conference.

Using this method to see what your friends are up to at SXSW, Anima said, frees people to use Twitter for broader purposes. For example, he said, it means that instead of trying to find within the "#sxsw" search flood what friends are doing, users can look for trends, like what people are saying are good panels.

Even that method might be overly cumbersome, however, given the hundreds, or thousands, of tweets being sent each hour at the conference.

To Laura Roeder, a consultant from Venice Beach, Calif., there's another solution altogether.

She said that she's been following SXSW Baby, a blog and Twitter account where the best of SXSW is being aggregated, allowing followers to restrict the information overflow.

"Last night, they re-tweeted a Gary (Vaynerchuk) party," Roeder said, speaking of what have become famous impromptu wine parties at SXSW, "so I knew about that."

Facebook's Dave Morin gets social with a Flip video camera before his talk.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

Updated at 10:12 a.m. PDT.

AUSTIN, Texas--"A joke I always make here is that if your friend did something on the Internet and you didn't hear about it, did it actually happen?" Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin said as he described the social network's renewed focus on a real-time stream of updates of friends' activities across the Web.

"We're happy to announce today that you have more control over the stream than ever before," Morin said, showing off screenshots of the recently redesigned Facebook homepage, which he said is now live for all members. "You have the ability to add and remove the people whose voices you care about the most."

More importantly? Facebook Connect has come to the iPhone. Read on.

Morin kept things lively, bringing up special guests like Seesmic founder Loic le Meur, who showed off the first-ever desktop client for Facebook, and Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk, who talked about using Facebook fan pages for personal branding.

"I wanted more than 5,000 friends," Vaynerchuk said, referring to the friends-list limit for normal Facebook profiles.. "I want to meet every person on Earth, and I want to buy the New York Jets. And a product like this allows me to do this, I think...This is word-of-mouth on steroids."

Morin's talk was Facebook's big SXSWi event. It was a far cry from last year's keynote address, in which famously awkward CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed onstage by BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy and the audience started to heckle when they didn't hear what they wanted to.

This year, the talk was a smaller one--albeit one that packed the room--led by the more extroverted Morin, who took the stage in cowboy boots and a suede jacket and responded to glitches and fluctuations with the room's lighting system by saying, "This is pretty awesome. It's a dance party!"

Morin's discussion, called "The Search for a More Social Web," comes at a time when Facebook has opted to start crawling out of its shell. Unlike many other big social networks, Facebook has traditionally kept its content behind a log-in wall, with only limited information available to search engines and nonmembers. But the Facebook Connect universal log-in service, launched last year, gives third-party sites the ability to let users register with their existing Facebook credentials. What users do on the third-party sites then gets reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook.

And this month, the social network launched not only reconfigured public profiles for brands, companies, and celebrities, but also redesigned versions of its homepage and profile pages that many observers and critics compared with the stream-like feed format of the uber-open Twitter.

"We think that the stream is an important concept that all of us on the Internet are working toward," Morin said, "and we think it's going to be a template for the future."

What's also important is Facebook Connect, Morin explained. He showed off examples from Joost to Xobni to iPhoto that have been souping up their social-networking offerings with the log-in standard.

"We have one more thing," Morin said at the end in an obvious nod to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "It's all about mobile and the iPhone, so today we're announcing Facebook Connect for the iPhone. For the first time, your iPhone apps can now have friends."

This means an application developer that has created an app for both the iPhone and Facebook can invite players to interact with one another cross-platform.

Launch partners are primarily games: among them are the Social Gaming Network (SGN), Tapulous, Zynga, and Playfish. SGN founder Shervin Pishevar showed off a new game called Agency Wars, in which players can take on the roles as spies and use geolocation to ambush friends in the real world on both Facebook and the iPhone.

"With the Facebook implementation, you can see all of your friends and recruit them to your agency and go on missions with them worldwide," Pishevar said.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't do this," Tapulous founder Andrew Lacy said of Facebook Connect for the iPhone.

But not all the launch partners were games: there was also Urbanspoon, an iPhone app that lets you randomly find restaurants nearby with a slot-machine format. Developer Patrick O'Donnell showed off how Facebook Connect has come to Urbanspoon: "One of the core missions of Urbanspoon is to bring together all the voices that you trust when you're trying to find out where to eat," he said. Photos and reviews can be added from Facebook accounts, and Urbanspoon preferences now show up in Facebook news feeds.

And movie-reviews app Flixster showed off how its iPhone app now lets members find Facebook friends who want to see the same movies and see what movies they've liked.

Morin said that Facebook Connect integration for the iPhone is soon coming from the likes of Slide, Loopt, MTV, EA Sports, Citizen Sports, and Pinger.

For more interested developers, Morin said that a new round of funding has been added to its FBFund developer seed fund specifically for iPhone developers.

"It's not just the search for social anymore, but we now have the social Web that we've all been dreaming of," he concluded.

Nothing against Google or any other big search engine, but I think my friends are smarter than the rest of the world. When I want advice on a restaurant, a product I'm thinking of buying, or where to take my kid on a rainy Saturday, it's my circle of contacts I want that info from. That's social search, and I think it's got a big future. I've covered a few interesting products in that space, and today I'm looking at another one that's rolling out during SXSW: Aardvark.

Aardvark is social search meets instant messaging, which is a clever marriage. You send a query to Aardvark via your instant-messenger client. The system figures out which people in your network (friends and friends of friends) might be able to answer it for you, sends them messages, and then forwards you the replies.

Aardvark does a good job of find people to answer your questions.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It archives everything on the Aardvark Web site, where you can also manage your friends and the topics you're interested in helping people with.

Aardvark's intelligence is the parsing and networking. It assigns categories to your natural-language queries and matches them to people who've indicated they can answer questions in them. I won't be getting fashion queries, for example, but I might get questions on places to take 2-year-olds in San Francisco. I also set it up so I only get questions when I'm online (per my IM status), so I don't get questions stacking up in my account.

In its early stage of development, it connects to AIM, GTalk, and Windows Live Messenger, but not to Yahoo IM. It also connects to Facebook. That's great--you don't have to start your Aardvark network from scratch. I found that 20 of my Facebook friends were already on Aardvark, and when I sent out my first query, I got replies back in minutes from people on that list as well as from friends of the person who invited me to Aardvark, co-founder and ex-Googler Nathan Stoll.

Who told Aardvark what I know?

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

I was impressed by the speed and quality of the answers I got back to my sample queries. Also, Aardvark expanded on the three topic areas I put down that I was knowledgeable about with several more that were accurate. I think it got them from my Facebook profile.

You could of course use Twitter to send questions to your circle of friends, but Aardvark is better, since it sends queries to friends of friends, doesn't spam all your followers with questions they may not be able to answer, and collects and organizes the replies for you. Aardvark doesn't yet work with Twitter, but that's coming, as are Yahoo IM and SMS connections.

Stoll said Aardvark will open to the public "in a few months."

See also: Fluther (review), another IM Q&A service, and Delver (review), a social-proximity-based search engine.

Taking a different approach to Google's Latitude software, Yahoo has released a Facebook application called Friends on Fire that lets people share their location with each other.

Google Latitude is an island unto itself, using Google's own technology for cell phone-based location detection and for managing who gets access to your location. Friends on Fire, though, stitches together a variety of services: Yahoo's Fire Eagle, a service that can store and share your location with authorized applications, and Facebook, which handles the issue of identifying who your friends are and granting them permission to see your location.

The service is intriguing, though as with any service that has to tiptoe carefully around a lot of privacy landmines, it can be somewhat burdensome to set up. It's great that Yahoo is making something real out of its Fire Eagle service, which previously was more about plumbing than a faucet.

Actually, King Cobra is no longer with us, but judging from the band's name, I probably wouldn't have gone anyway.

Bandloop is a relatively new service that helps you find live shows in your area.

I had mixed feelings about the Web version of the service--I'm not so fond of the way it forces you to pick favorite bands to follow--but today, I had a chance to try out their new free iPhone application, and I'm very impressed. It's a cut above the iPhone version of JamBase, a long-established gig-listing service.

The Bandloop app is simple, as all good iPhone apps should be. If you've got a 3G iPhone, you allow Bandloop to find your location. Bandloop consults its database of shows (which are mostly entered by members) and geocoded venues. Then it displays a map centered at your location with all of that day's local shows displayed on the map.

You can view a list of shows for more information, and toggle between today and tomorrow. That's it. There's no connection with the personalized Bandloop service, which makes perfect sense--if you're out with your iPhone, you don't care that Widespread Panic's coming to town later this month. You want to know what's going on right here, right now.

The only flaw I could find was a listing at a club that went belly-up last month, but that's not Bandloop's fault--listings are contributed by users, so it's garbage in, garbage out. (Most likely, the person who listed the gig didn't go back to delist it when the club went under.)

This is going to be incredibly useful at South by Southwest next week. The music calendar is daunting to say the least, and I've never been to Austin, so I don't know where any particular club is located. With Bandloop, I can just scan and go.

Follow Matt on Twitter.