SXSW Report

Unfortunately, I’m still sitting here in Bloomington waiting for my flight.  It’s now been delayed 2 hours and 15 minutes.  It’s given me time to double check things (although I’ll still probably forget something) and update my iPhone.

I’ve already mentioned that the location based wars were heating up before SXSW, but I was shocked when I went to update my iPhone today and had app updates from Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Whrrl.  And these are just the location based apps I have on my phone (along with Brightkite).

It should certainly be interesting to watch as things progress this weekend as each are running plenty of promotions.  Gowalla is even throwing a party, and the only way to get in is to “find” a virtual VIP wristband by checking in around Austin.  They’re also having a contest giving away some real items if you find them virtually.

Since Twitter hit it big on Oprah about this time last year, everyone’s been wondering, “What’s the next big thing.”  The technology that has been emerging as the next big thing appears to be location based social networking tools.  Over the last year, services like Gowalla, Whrrl, and Foursquare have been catching on with the techset and are starting to reach the mainstream.  It has forced other services like Yelp to incorporate location based checkins to their services. 

Just in time for SXSW, one of the players in this area – Brightkite – is planning to launch a universal check-in feature to their service – tieing into the APIs of these other services.  Essentially, this would allow users to check in via Brightkite and it would automatically update their location on Foursquare and others (although Gowalla’s API is currently read-only).

It will be interesting to watch the location based social networking services battle at SXSW this year.  Me, I’ll keep updating the services I have on my phone – Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare (just removed Whrrl) – while I’m there.