Bands in Town

I can’t recall how many times I went to a band’s website to check their tour dates only to find out they were in town last week or last month.

Luckily, I don’t think I’ll run into this again thanks to a social media app that is designed for that very purpose. Bands in Town is a clean web app that allows you to manually add your favorite artists or import them from Last.FM or Pandora. The app then allows your to track past and future tour dates (with optional email reminders) and to export live calendar (.ical) and rss feeds to your favorite calendar app or RSS aggregator. Along with helping you track tour dates of your favorite artists, Bands in Town will also make recommendations and create a neat cloud to help you explore all the shows in your area. An added bonus: you can authenticate using your twitter account (OAuth) so no signup is necessary.

While this tip probably won’t help you if you have a generic name or share a name with a celebrity, it should work pretty well for most names.

Google Alerts is a nifty service from the big G that allows you to receive emails whenever a new item that matches certain keywords in Web, News, Blogs, Video, Groups, or ‘Comprehensive’ which looks for keywords in all of the above. Better yet, you can generate an RSS feed that will keep you up to date on new entries with your name ‘as-it-happens’.

Once you create a feed, you can easily add it to Google Reader or your favorite RSS aggregator and keep track of new information as it enters the Google search index.

Have a better way of keeping track of your online identity? Post them in the comments.

Google Buzz, Google's latest attempt at social media.

Is Google Buzz yet another social media site to visit? Is it really revolutionary enough to challenge the social networking ‘default’ of Facebook and the microblogging ‘default’ of Twitter? Many are asking this very question.

While Google Buzz is not revolutionary social media platform, it is different enough and good enough at what it does to challenge Facebook and Twitter in their respective strengths. For one, Buzz does what ‘the best of Facebook’ does and the ‘best of Twitter’ does and it does it better. Buzz is an open platform with a well-documented set of APIs that allow other services to seamlessly connect up and contribute information. Google Buzz plays nice with the industry leading social media standards which.

Why then doesn’t Google Buzz connect to Facebook? The answer is simple — that isn’t the game that Facebook wants to play. Facebook has a very restrictive API that makes it difficult or impossible to extract useful information. Facebook’s current strategy for user retention is to make it inconvenient for users to move their information — rather than to give users new innovative features to keep users put.

But does Google Buzz have any answers to one of the more pressing challenges of social media — the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — the excess amount of ‘useless’ information overcrowding the ‘useful’ information? Maybe not right away, but I think Google has a much better shot at providing us with the answer than anyone else in the business.  Google knows a ton about how to show users what they want to see. They are arguably the world-leader in targeted information delivery. Be it Google Search, AdSense/AdWords, Google News, or GMail spam filtering — they have the expertise to tackle the SNR problem. Before Google, people accepted that they had to look through a couple of pages of search results on Altavista or Ask before finding what they were looking for. Nobody complained until Google came along and said “We can do better”.

Google Buzz is not just Twitter on steroids. Google Buzz is much more than a 140-character-at-a-time microblogging platform. Google Buzz is a rich media platform. It integrates beautifully with Google-owned YouTube and Picasa and leaves the door open for other services to follow suit. Buzz also does this really well. Adding a link to the post quickly fetches the page description and the images that can be added to the post in a matter of seconds.

All in all, Google Buzz has not reinvented the wheel, but doesn’t mean it’s doomed for failure. The fact that people don’t see the product as radically different is actually a plus. I believe that if the mainstream views Google Buzz as ‘not that different from Facebook or Twitter’ it’s going to encourage more people to give it a try, even if they aren’t all that displeased with their current social media setup.

Unlike Facebook, Google Buzz is very tidy and clean, and very fast. People will appreciate the lack of advertising and absence of annoying so-called ‘apps’ and tight integration with GMail. Google Buzz may evolve into a social media aggregator — making it the go-to-place for catching up on the ‘buzz’ from all of your social media sites.