We’ve just added what will likely be our final new features to SitBy.Us ahead of the conference this week. You can now import your schedule from Sched.org as well as my.sxsw.com. (In actuality, you already could, but we’ve made it more explicit.)

And more importantly, you can now subscribe to or export your SitBy.Us schedule in .ics format — which means if you want to import your schedule into iCal or Google Calendar or Outlook, you can. Since we let you pull in schedules from elsewhere, it seemed only right for us to let you take yours wherever you want. It’s your data, do what you like with it. Heck, if you could figure out how to do it, you could import your SitBy.Us schedule into Sched or My.SXSW. This is also a good failsafe against wifi outages at the conference center, allowing you offline access to what you plan to attend.

We’re still updating the schedule with new panels and events, and probably will continue to do so even as registration opens on Thursday. We’re excited to see the function we built SitBy.Us to address — finding friends in the biggest SXSW Interactive ever — in action. Look forward to seeing you there!

March 08, 2010, 11:58am

We added two new features to SitBy.Us this week: sharing and importing schedules.

Share your schedule. You can now let friends know what you plan to attend with a simple shortURL based on your username, visible at the top of the Your Schedule page. For example, you can take a look at Naz’s schedule at http://sitby.us/weightshift.

Import your my.sxsw.com schedule. If you’ve already taken the time to work out your schedule on my.SXSW, it’s a bit of a hassle to have to re-do that in another app like SitBy.Us. So, we’ve made it easy to import your selections via iCal.

First, go to the “My Schedule” page on my.sxsw.com, copy the iCal link listed just below “Any Day” on the page (it’s represented by a little calendar icon, and ends with .ics). Then go to the importer page in SitBy.Us (there’s a link at the bottom of the Your Schedule page) and paste the URL into the entry field. Tap the Import button, and your schedule will be updated.

We continue to make updates to the schedule—the current total is 715 after SXSW added more panels and events, removed some and moved still others to new time slots. Stay tuned!

March 03, 2010, 8:24am

Here’s the short version, from Twitter:

Hey, we now have panel shorturls and a count of total people interested on the panel pages. Convenient tools for panelists! http://sitby.us

The longer version is this: We realized that we could help presenters (and hosts) raise awareness of their panels (and events) by providing easy-to-share shortURLS for their panels and a total count of everyone who’d marked their interest in their panel (or, yes, event). Not only that, but those same things might also be useful to regular SitBy.Us users in determining what to attend and how they share their decision with friends.

The shortURL is simply a sitby.us link with a string of four numbers (in almost every instance, it’s the number assigned to the panel in SXSW Interactive’s own database) for a quick 21-character URL you can tweet, email, shout out car windows, whatever. Like so: http://sitby.us/0000/

The “everyone interested in attending” number gives you a better picture of how popular a panel is beyond just how many of your own Twitter friends are attending you see elsewhere. It’s a nice number to know if you’re on a panel or planning a party, but as an attendee, it may influence your decision-making in a couple of ways. First, that number may help you decide which panel to pick at a given hour. Second, if a panel is particularly popular, you might want to get to the room a little earlier than normal to score a good seat — and maybe save one or two for your friends. Even just as we tested it out prior to roll-out, the count yielded some surprises as we compared counts.

Here’s a screenshot of how these new features look on Andrew’s panel Sunday:

Hopefully you find it useful as you sift through your many, many options.

February 24, 2010, 10:21am

If you’ve ever been to SXSW Interactive, you know that it can be difficult to find where your friends are sitting in a panel, particularly in the massive auditoriums and the notorious 18BCD. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your friends know where you’re sitting — or find out where they are — in an easy-to-use app?

SitBy.Us is meant to do just that. It combines an easily scannable panel schedule with simple room maps on which you can check in and give your friends an idea of where to start looking for you. You also have the ability to be more specific about where you’re sitting or include some other commentary. It’s linked into your Twitter account, so you don’t even have to worry about adding your friends.

For more, please read the introductory post over at Weightshift.

February 18, 2010, 10:23pm