On October 14 Web development firm Remsen Media announced in a
press release the launch of the first ever social music ticketing network,
Twck.it. It is similar to
Kayak in the sense of its use as a search engine. Twck.it allows its users to search for, buy, and sell concert tickets to other users. Sounds a lot like StubHub doesn't it? Well, although it is similar there are differences.
Advantages
It's a search engine in a sense so it allows you to look in several places for your tickets. Twck.it allows its users to look for concert tickets from others users on sites such as
StubHub, Twitter, Facebook, Craigstlist, and ebay as well as it's own Twck.it users. It is definitely a good thing right now, since there are very few Twck.it users right now (they did just launch a few days ago).
It also seems a little bit more credible than sites like Craigslist. Twck.it requires its users to have an existing facebook or twitter account in order to use its services. This is meant to weed out the spammers and ticket scalpers. It recommends that you link your postings to your facebook and twitter accounts. It also allows you to look at live reports of listing views and how people found them. It also allows for users to rate each other after buying tickets, similar to the systems used by Amazon.com and ebay.
"Getting tickets from legitimate sellers into the hands of legitimate buyers is our goal. The currently available online marketplaces don’t solve the problem, as sellers can remain mysterious, or are forced by necessity to raise prices due to bidding and sales commissions. In the end, it’s about getting concert goers to their events as seamlessly as possible.”
-Read Roberts, President and founder of Remsen Media.
The best part of all... IT'S FREE!! Well the services are, maybe not the tickets. It costs nothing to post, search for, or buy tickets. No fees of any kind. And you don't have to register on the site. Just log in with your facebook or twitter account!
Disadvantages
One BIG disadvantage I noticed is the fact that you can only buy concert tickets. They don't offer tickets for sports games, charity events, theater productions, or other popular events such as the Kentucky Derby. TicketMaster and StubHub do and it doesn't seem like it would be that much more difficult to add those categories to its repertoire. It may be trying to specialize by concentrating solely on music artists, but it is missing out on a big market by excluding sporting events and others.
Another problem is the layout of the site is very simplistic. It doesn't allow you to look for specific seats or sections like StubHub or
TicketMaster do. It is just very simple. I don't know if there is another word for it. This does make it easy to navigate through but rather dull when utilizing it.
One MAJOR flaw they must fix immediately is their facebook filter results. I did a search for Lady Antebellum tickets and noticed that many of the numerous "sellers" weren't trying to sell any tickets. The majority of them were updating their facebook statuses regarding their plans to attend the concert. It seems like this could be quite frustrating if you were looking to buy tickets from people who weren't willing to sell them. And it would get very old if you were the Facebook user posting about the concert in your statuses and kept getting random messages from people trying to buy your tickets.
Twck.it does offer a warning in fine print above the search results:
"Please note, that we've tried to only show updates from fans selling tickets, but search results from Facebook may not be accurate and are not strictly for the Date & Location of your search."
And also for Twitter results:
"Please note, that we've tried to only show updates from fans selling tickets, but search results from Twitter may not be accurate and are not strictly for the Date & Location of your search. "
They may warn us, but if they don't fix this problem soon, they are going to have a much bigger problem in the future when more people are utilizing their site.
The layout of the site is very simplistic. It doesn't allow you to look for certain seats like StubHub or TicketMaster. It is just very simple. I don't know if there is another word for it. This does make it easy to navigate through but rather dull when utilizing it.
Is this as good a tool as many are predicting? Possibly. It has a great start, but in order to reach its full potential Twck.it needs to work out the kinks...soon.
The apps for phones and apple products are another addiction I am slowly developing. I recently bought a new ITouch and was glued to it the first week after I bought it. I had no idea how many apps were out there!
