Twitter was still “this year’s Twitter” at SXSW (the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX), but another online app was almost equally as useful to me, Sched. For those in the Bay Area this week for the Web 2.0 Expo, Sched is back with a WEB2.0EXPO calendar.
Sched is an online scheduling application that makes organizing big events or multi-day conferences like SXSW and Web 2.0 simple. By grouping together events that are taking place at the same time in large time slots, it is easy to pick and choose which events you are going to go to. If you find one you like, you just check its box to save it, as well as let other Sched users know you are going.
Different types of events are represented by different color boxes. For example, for Web 2.0, keynotes are in pink, panels are in green, workshops are in blue and parties are in orange. Hovering over any event will give you more details about it such as venue, tags, panelists and any relevant links.
Sched makes it easy to print, search and share your personal calendar. You can also send updates to Sched about what you are doing straight from the social messaging application Twitter.
To me, it’s the ease-of-use and clean visual organizational elements that set Sched apart from a service like Yahoo’s Upcoming. Often that service will have too much going on within a page, profile icons, maps, notes, which really all I want is a coordinated calendar. Sched is also a more tailored experience, creating seperate calendars based around big events (they take suggestions for ones to do as well).
Sched is the brain-child of Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta, the team that is also behind the Internet video browser, Chime.TV. McKnight tells us that Sched is self-funded, but hints that could change.
Over the weekend we wrote about some of the parties going on for Web 2.0. You can find a list of the popular ones according to Sched here. Ogilvy PR’s Adriana Gascoigne’s list is also worth checking out if you’re into that kind of thing.
