Sweetness: Jimmy Eat World Uses Twitter For Concert-Specific Chats

Jimmy Eat World has just launched an innovative new site for its American tour that uses a clever implementation of Twitter to give fans an easy way to chat about each upcoming concert. To use the system, simply send a tweet to @jimmyeatworld, followed by the date of the upcoming concert you’ll be attending. Here are the complete instructions:

Tweet @jimmyeatworld #YYYYMMDD (where YYYYMMDD is the date of the show). For example, @jimmyeatworld #20090223 can’t wait to see you in New York!

Forums related to individual shows are nothing new – many artists homepages and fan sites feature boards dedicated to helping fans connect and talk about upcoming and recent concerts. But these generally require users to sign up for accounts, and they don’t really work well for ongoing conversations during the show itself. The new Twitter system is much more accessible (assuming you have a Twitter account), and also lends itself to real-time chats.

Tweets pertaining to each show are separated and presented on their own pages, making it easy to see who will be going and what people have been saying about the concert. Because the site is so new only a few dozen tweets have been saved, but the stream could be used in any number of ways, from offering parking tips to chatting during the show itself. It’s a cool system, but it could probably use some work – for one, each hash tag weighs in at nearly 25 characters, which would be frustrating to enter multiple times (I’d prefer it if every show used an easy abbreviation like #sf).

And while this is by no means the first system to use Twitter to let users submit content (Techmeme just launched one last week), it’s definitely another sign that the service is going increasingly mainstream.