Tour Bus - Social Software That Requires No Work!
Less than an hour after I posted my take on Nicholas Carr’s comment that social software is a passing fad because it takes too much work, I got an email from Mike Champion that really proves my point:
Saw your blog post about social software you don’t have to work to use, and thought I’d shared a site I’ve been working on that aims to make it easier to find out when bands you like are coming to town without much work. The site is:
http://tourb.us
You can search for shows, or if you sign up can use an iTunes playlist or Last.fm account to bootstrap your list of favorite bands, then you can get notified about shows via email / RSS / iCal.
It’s still young (we launched earlier this summer), and doesn’t have nearly all the shows in NYC yet, but we’re actively working on that.
If you check it out, I’d be curious to know what you think.
I’ll tell you and everyone else what I think of TourBus Mike. I think TourBus rocks! (and I love the use of .us too).
This is exactly what I was talking about in my post yesterday. I did five minutes of work last year installing the last.fm agent on my computer. I’ve installed it now on a bunch of computers in our house so it captures all of our music listens. Last.fm knows what music we like because it watches what we do without any effort on our part.
And by simply entering my last.fm login info into TourBus, I now have this amazing service that tells me when the bands I like are coming to town.
Better yet, I can publish the list of shows I am going to see. Here it is for this fall (doesn’t include Austin City Limits, just the NYC shows). I really need a badge/widget Mike because linking is tired and embedding is wired.
What I don’t know is if TourBus will alert me before the tickets go on sale. That’s the killer app.
Actually the killer app is for me to make TourBus my agent where they alert me of the shows before the tickets go on sale, I check off which shows I want to see and how many tickets I want, and they get them for me. Not sure if that’s what Mike has in mind with TourBus, but I love what he’s built so far.