SXSW (Twitter) Tools

Twitterati indeed - it's almost comical. People are Twitter-crazy here here at SXSW.  There's so much data, I'm having difficult making something meaningful from the stream. That said, lot's of really interesting tools people are using. 

Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/): A Twitter Air client for your desktop. Looking around at people on their laptops, this seems to be the client of choice. The first question from the first session was "what's the hash for this session?". Twhirl allows you to "search" for hashes (eg. #swsw) and it automatially feeds the stream - really great during the sessions. 

Peoplebrowsr (http://www.peoplebrowsr.com). A very feature-rich web-based twitter client. What I really like about it is that you can "search" for and watch multiple streams concurrenting (eg I was watching #sxsw, #austin, #sxswi all at once today - it was pretty crazy). 

Outside.in (http://outside.in) This came up during Steve Johnson's (co-creator of outside.in) panel. It's actually primarily to be a crowd-sourced local-news site, but they have a clever mashup that overlays tweets, "story maps", containing geo-data on a map (ie. if you tweet "sxswguide: Heading of to Six Lounge for the Social Media Group party. sxswi (@hametner) MARCH 13" it will put "Six Lounge" on the map). 

Other tools people seem to be using: 

Sched.org - The SXSW schedule site sucks really bad. Even the printed schedule is unusable this year (I think last year it showed the sessions in order, with a brief summary - this year, not so much). Sched.org is a really usable web-based, SXSW-dedicated, calendar that lets you filter by show (interactive, film, etc) as well provide high-level summary of the sessions. It let's you find free booze and food, and let's you merge calendars with your fellow-attendees. 

happyhour.org - SXSW-dedicated party schedules. The sanctioned-sxsw schedule is better this year (it actually shows some of the parties), but this online tool is definitely more complete.