I’m going to be blunt. If you’ve never been to the vibrant city of Austin Texas and the yearly interactive conference called “South By Southwest” (SXSW) you’re missing out. Food-wise, it’s six days of eating delicious slow-cooked Texas BBQ, food truck fare, some of the most whoop-ass Tex-Mex that I’ve ever met, all while listening to compelling and inspiring presentations by leaders in the interactive industry. On top of that, you have the unique opportunity to be introduced to new technology platforms that could potentially reshape our culture. For example, Twitter launched at SXSW in 2007 and Foursquare launched at SXSW 2009.

This years hot technology was Group Texting. An ingenious yet very basic idea that’s leaving people thinking—why didn’t I think of that?

Here’s a brief description: Any person with an SMS enabled mobile phone can create a messaging group and invite other SMS mobile phone users to join the group. The service (I prefer GroupMe) assigns a unique phone number to that group. Members of the group can then send messages to the group phone number and those messages are forwarded to the rest of the members in the group. Quite literally, it’s an SMS chat room.

Platform-wise, it’s VERY basic and is built upon an existing cloud communications API called Twilio. Using the service is uber-easy. Yet as a utility, it proved itself to be very powerful.

Understand, that at any one time, there are hundreds of different worthwhile activities you could be doing at SXSW. We used GroupMe to keep 9 people up-to-date with what the others in the group were doing, provide group feedback on speakers and thoughts on food experiences. As expected, the messaging got obnoxious, especially in the early AM hours. But for the most part, GroupMe fostered a camaraderie and a secondary discussion layer amongst the group that would have otherwise been lost.