Monday, February 2, 2009
My, my, my, My.SXSW
Just in time for the run-up to Valentine’s Day, SXSW is asking, “Won’t you be mine my?”
Remember the old SXSW registrant directory? Well, forget it! SXSW has just launched my.sxsw.com, a complete overhaul—and in some regards, a complete rethinking—of the beast. Sez the e-mail:
Created by The Social Collective with your needs in mind, my.SXSW allows you to communicate with other registrants and attendees year-round—its messaging system integrates with Twitter—and join groups of attendees with specific interests. You can also build a personal schedule for SXSW 2009, sign up for SXSW Alerts, and upload a badge photo.
After a brief first look, it’s pretty sweet. There’re lots of tasty tips in the FAQ.
The only nit to pick is that the profile form doesn’t have a dedicated place to list one’s website(s). You can use the Biography field but it strips away HTML.
It’d be super nifty if there were hooks to interact with other existing social and sharing sites besides Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, and contribute to activity streams on such services as FriendFeed, but you have to start somewhere (what are there, like a billion social sites out there now?!) and my.sxsw is such a vast improvement over what it replaced, we’re just chuffed it’s there at all. Thanks, SXSW!
(If you’re interested in the tech behind the tool, The Social Collective will be showing off at Tech Cocktail DC 4 on February 26.)

