Notes from Austin part two

Mar 16, 2011 by Dirk Singer

Social networks that impressed us at SXSW

Over the past few days we’ve had the chance to look at a number of social networks via the Austin (Texas) petri dish when we went to SXSW.

Here’s a selection of networks that really impressed us (to find out what the SXSW fuss is all about read the earlier post)

1 – Gowalla - At Rabbit we love Gowalla, much preferring it to the larger location based network (and Gowalla competitor) foursquare.

Certainly, Gowalla is not new, but we like their open, egalitarian ethos – and how they’ve managed to do a great deal with a very small team.

We prefer the interface and design to foursquare’s, and their SXSW marketing (including handing out nicely designed passports where you collected stickers to go to a party) was smart without being too in your face.

In part we also like Gowalla because we work with a number of travel clients.

Gowalla pretty much lends itself to the hospitality, entertainment and travel industries with the ability to check in, and create tours with custom badges that Gowalla will hand draw for you.

For example, have a look at what Gowalla is doing with Disney, which involves a mixture of real and online world check ins and badge collecting.

2 – View.io - Only live in a few US cities for now, View pushes hints and tips (which being centred around pictures are visual) about your city / town to your phone, with those tips being submitted by the community.

Austin examples included being told about the rapid phone charging station in the conference center, notifications about the ipad2 queues in front of the pop up apple store and eating and drinking recommendations.

Though we wondered if these kind of push-tactic notifications would get annoying if used in every day life, we saw a definite use for View in situations where a lot of out of towners congregate in one place – say trade fairs or music festivals such as Bestival or Glastonbury

3 – Groupme – We made use of group messaging service Beluga, recently acquired by Facebook, while in Austin (we also use it as a Rabbit communications platform)

But the one that really interests us is rival service Groupme, which the founders assure us will be available for International use very soon.

Basically Groupme and Beluga work as mobile bulletin boards and chat rooms where you can share information, notes, links and photos with your nominated group via the app – with any new notifications being pushed to your phone like a text message.

Group messaging is set to be a big deal and we can see why.

There are a stack of ways these apps can be used – from communication within companies and small teams, to creating groups when at events / festivals to even something mundane like having a group for a house share where everyone is working and out at different times of the day.

4 – Hurricane Party – Hurricane Party claims to be ‘social networking that’s actually social’. Basically you create ‘spontaneous’ parties by using the geo-location features of your phone and contacts list.

We saw Hurricane Party live in action when the founders created a SXSW Japan benefit event in 24 hours

A Hurricane Party obviously doesn’t have to be a party in a literal sense, and we could see it being used by brands for competitions (turn up here to win X)

5 – Planely – Planely wasn’t present at SXSW as such, but the company did send out a note to delegates beforehand encouraging them to register. Planely allows you to see who else is on your flight (provided they signed up) at which point you can message them, meet up for a coffee, share a cab from the airport etc.

Though its unlikely to be something holiday makers will use, we do see a use for it at conferences and trade fairs to allow networking to begin on the plane and at the airport.

6 – Instagram and other mobile photo sharing networks – Photo sharing sites have been gaining ground over the past six months, one session we went to involving Facebook’s photo and video boss, gave a few reasons why.

First of all, smart phone use (without which most of the above tools are no good to you anyway) is now at around a third in Europe and North America.

Secondly, logging in and integrating these apps with your Facebook or other social network accounts has cleaned them up – anyone is going to think twice before loading up porn

Thirdly, storage costs make photo sharing sites viable outside of giants such as Flickr (Yahoo) – important given the volume of uploads taking place. Indeed, Facebook, not usually thought of as a photo sharing network, sees the equivalent of Flickr being uploaded every month

And finally, apps such as instagram make – as the panel put it – bad (or ordinary) pictures look good through their filters. For examples of how brands are using Instagram, this Mashable article is worth reading.

7 – Dokobots – Location based gaming was one of the features of SXSW (Seth Priebatsch of SCNVGR gave a keynote), and one that caught our eye was Dokobots.

Basically games such as Dokobots use the real world as a game field, in Dokobots case you unleash a character like a little tamagotchi, and collect (or buy) batteries to send him / her on challenges such as traveling half way around the (real) world to pick up items and content.

8 – SXSW G0 – and finally it’s worth saying how hugely impressed we were by the SXSW smartphone and iPad app itself.

It featured an extremely user friendly interface, a nice design, integration with Facebook, twitter, gowalla and email for each event and the ability to look at the schedule off line.

Xomo, the Canadian company behind the app also designed the one for the Vancouver Winter Olympics – LOCOG, are you listening?

This post formed the basis of our weekly Rabbit Feed at (day job) Rabbit. Sign up to get it here! Also be sure to check out Cat Turner’s SXSW Tumblr.