Hot London-based live music startup Songkick launches a new feature today allowing users to share their experiences of gigs. Users can now connect their Songkick account to their Twitter account and auto-tweet any gigs they plan to go to. That’s not that big a deal. What is pretty interesting however is how they’ve integrated Twitter to bring a realtime stream to their service.
When a user goes to a show, Songkick automatically pulls in tweets that they write during the concert as realtime, live reviews. The tweets are from actual gig-goers, making this way more valuable than just pulling in generic artist searches. This looks like the first time anyone has done this.
Since Songkick knows which gigs you’re attending via your Songkick gig calendar, once you’ve connected your account with Twitter it searches your twitter stream during the day of the gig for a mention of the artist, the venue or the hashtag #songkick.
These tweets are pulled them in as real-time comments on the gig, and – furthermore – they are then preserved for all time on the dedicated Songkick concert page for that gig.
I think this is interesting because sharing on Twitter alone means your experience gets lost in the ether the days and weeks after the gig, and won’t be found by a Twitter search even a week afterwards.
By connecting into Twitter, Songkick is going to effectively freeze-frame that gig, preserving the moment when everyone was tweeting enthusiastically about the band they were watching.
It’s an idea that is probably going to be applied to lots of other areas, especially ones were people are passionate about something, like music.