(cross-posted from the SCHED blog)

Hey SCHEDxSWers. SXSWm is in full swing, so it’s a bit of a crazy time to push out new features, but what the hell, right? In that spirit, here’s a new feature I’ve been working on that has been super-useful for helping me navigate around.

Simply put it’s a map layer that includes your SCHED as well as every other event that’s happening over the next few hours. But wait, there’s more! Since we have a few thousand people making SCHED’s this year (yeah!), we actually have some decent data on how relatively busy any specific show is going to be. When you click in, that’s represented by the length of the red bars (with longest being most busy).

I’ll be trying to add a couple more features, over the next couple days, but I think it’s pretty useful as is and we’d love to hear your feedback as we whip this into shape.

Here are directions on how to get this working on iPhone and Android (we haven’t tested anything else yet, so let us know how it works elsewhere. It’s just a KML map, so it should work anywhere that supports it).

This is the map URL, replace ‘lhl’ with your username:

http://atx.sched.org/lhl/map

On Android, all you have to do is type this in the Google Maps Search Bar. Make sure you type the whole URL with http and it’ll give you what you see in the screenshots.

On iPhone, unfortunately, you lose all the detail information with the default map, but if you go to http://maps.google.com/ in Mobile Safari and type in the Google Maps Search Bar it should work.

On iPhone, there’s a free app called My Maps Editor that you can use (it’s great, but you need to click in preferences to make it refresh), and on both, loading your map URL in Google Earth also works.

Let us know how it works for you (though it’s fresh untested code with sharp edges, so it might not!) and feel free to send bug reports to lhl@sched. If none of the directions make sense, don’t worry, we’ll push it into the main mobile site as it gets more baked soon.