Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato.  Here is where they fit in:

What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”.  Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go. 

Hot Potato is similar, but with a focus not as much on the places themselves as on the live events happening either directly in a real nearby place or one 1,000 miles away. Think of it as a mobile or virtual social layer on top of eventful or meetup.com where folks check in to events to socialize.

How it works:  As with Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, having your friends involved is a key component of the service.  So the first step is to invite all your friends with handy friend imports from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail supported. Once your friends are connected you can kind out what events they’re attending or create your own events and invite others to join you.  Like with Foursquare, people check in to an event in progress and can share comments and pictures with other attendees… events can be open to anyone or made private for only a select group to participate.

I can see this type of tool being particularly good for a business conference where everyone is there to network and share information and to socialize. I tried to set an event up for the Where2.0 conference happening in San Jose this week…  seems that no one found it and a new one was created instead… although even that one had just 16 folks check in and only on posting that I could see.

The Hot Potato service is just getting off the ground, and seems to be in its very early stages at this point, with many kinks to be worked out. The website seems to be down a lot, and I left a question with customer service five days ago about how to set up an event, and have yet to hear back.

For attending real world events at physical places it will be interesting to see if Hot Potato can find enough ways to differentiate itself with features targeting the needs of live event goers maybe around tickets and what to do afterwards. Currently there is not a lot more you can do with Hot Potato than what someone might find checking in somewhere like at Madison Square Garden for an event or at ‘Snowpocalypse’ on Foursquare… with their more loose interpretation of ‘place’.

The service is currently heavily used for ‘virtual events’ around social television watching, like March Madness or the latest episode of ABC’s Lost… making what for many is likely not a very social activity of sitting in front of the tv at home, a bit more virtually social at least. Although it feels like the live and in person events need a different set of capabilities than the virtual event attendance like watching a tv episode, so I suspect that at some point soon, Hot Potato may need to split and decide which market they’re after and how to really differentiate themselves.

Its an interesting enough twist however to continue to keep an eye on.

Oh how I wish I could have made it to SXSW this year… I think. I’ve been once before for the music part, but have never had the opportunity to experience the technology sessions. I did catch some video of the event online, specifically a bit from diggnation on the new iPhone 3.0 features. See the video above for yourself, but I for one found the level of excitement over the cut and paste feature, to well, be a little disturbing. C’mon folks it’s cut and paste! Felt more like Brad Pitt announced he was getting married to Madonna to a room full of 13 year olds!

Any entrepreneurs out there? Might I suggest starting a rehab progam targeted to those that have OD’d on all things digital… you know they could be forced to use a paper and pencil for a week, and only communicate via a landline phone and watch one of those old tv’s with only six channels and one turn knob to change channels.

What I would have liked to see at SXSW was the LBS advertising panel and to have learned a bit more about the re launch of Whrrl.

For those not familiar with Whrrl, version 1 was a very slick desktop and mobile map oriented application that was largely designed to allow groups of friends to share their experiences about places they have visited. The execution on the idea, was very well done, although the idea required a ton of people to use the application for it to really be valuable, and also was a silo
unto itself in a world where people were already sharing anything and everything with their friends via clear leaders in the social networking world like Facebook and MySpace. As it seems to have turned out, sharing just location oriented items among your social network, may not be a stand alone business at this stage in the game.

The new version of Whrrl, still has location as an important element, but location seems to have taken a back seat to the ability to pull together a number of elements to allow users to paint a more complete story to answer the question of “What are you doing?” The company’s new tagline “What’s your story?” seems designed to allow those that aren’t satisfied with just being able to inform their network of “What they’re doing”, to kick it up a notch and tell us alot more about what they’re doing, in the form of a complete story.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post about Loopt and Whrrl, the one key features I liked in Loopt, was the ease at which I could update Facebook with not only “What I am doing” but with the location element layered in as well. Well with the new version of Whrrl, they’ve now done that and one better by making it simple to push updates to both Facebook and Twitter, along with a link that brings people to the deeper multi dimensional story including location, photos, etc.

I gave it a shot this weekend, even though I am probably not the ideal candidate for Whrrl since I am a horrible storyteller and usually find other more fullfilling stuff to do than to take a bunch of pictures and give them interesting and informative captions throughout my typical day. And as far as I know there is no one else living vicariously through my life that would really care about all that detail anyway.

Like Whrrl version 1, they have got the slick presentation stuff down very well. Much of the navigation throughout the application was very logical and simple and the integration with Facebook Connect worked fine for me with absolutely no problems. I was generally able to update my location, add photos and text to Whrrl with ease (although I did notice that the new FourSquare did a better job of resolving location down to the buildings and businesses directly around me). I did find it aggrevating to put in notes for a post or, to serve as a caption for a picture (which by the way doesn’t accompany the picture very well), only to find that if I wanted to post those comments directly to Facebook that I had to retype them, which on a mobile phone can be very annoying.

I also noticed that people may not get the fact that there is more information off the url that accompanies your Facebook update. I had recently updated my status on Facebook that I was at a popular BBQ restaruant which is part of a chain in Florida… moments later a friend chimed in “which one?”, despite the fact that the full map detail was available one click away.

I think I understand the gap that Whrrl is trying to fill. You can only say so much in 115 characters, and if pictures can say 1,000 words, pictures plus maps should be able to tell an even richer story… which they do indeed. So Whrrl is the platform to plug into social networks for those that don’t want to be restricted by what they want to say.

One additional interesting feature they may want to add would be a graphical display of a timeline related to the story, to not only see “where” and hear about the “what” and “why”, but also to give a better grasp on the “when”.

Only time will tell if this new approach will take off, but it certainly seems to have a better shot than Whrrl version 1.0.