Buzzd Is An iPhone App Built For Party Crashing

A couple months ago, we wrote about SocialGreat, a cool service that uses Foursquare’s location APIs to determine the hot places that people are hanging out at. It’s a good idea, but it’s limited to Foursquare data [update below], which is still a relatively small service. Buzzd, on the other hand, pulls its data from Twitter and other Buzzd users, for a bigger picture of places that are hot.

With Buzzd, which is launching its free iPhone app today, you simply load the program and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. It also uses some location data pulled from Twitter. Right now, that data is pulled from users’s Twitter profiles, so it is imprecise, but with the Geolocation API (which may be sort of live already) that will soon change.

If you click on a place, you can learn more about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the Buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter.

To do all of that, you have to create an account on Buzzd and sign-in, but one nice thing about the service is that you can see all of this data without ever creating an account. If you really don’t care about buzzing data yourself, you can simply use it passively.

There is certainly an upside to using data that is purely location-based, as it is with SocialGreat, but until location-based services truly take off, services with a lower barrier to entry, like Twitter, are going to have much more data to offer up. And you can clearly see that with Buzzd.

Buzzd has actually been around for a little while, but it has mainly existed on the mobile web and as an app on the BlackBerry. There’s a good reason for this: It was one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund receipients. But the lure of the iPhone proved too strong, and after one meek attempt at an app, this new version of Buzzd looks like the real deal. It’s not a complex app, but it’s good for what it does.

Last month, the service had 500,000 active user over the web and its BlackBerry app, we’re told. Those numbers should undoubtedly jump with this new iPhone app. As it gains users, you can imagine them doing slightly more interesting things such as allowing users to say if a venue is good or bad, rather than just if they are there or not.

The business model will revolve around advertising, but the company is doing some interesting things in terms of striking deals with some locations to get their places featured.

You can find Buzzd here in the App Store. Again, it is a free download.

Update: We originally had said that SocialGreat only pulls in Foursquare data, but it now pulls in more, including data from Brightkite and GraffitiGeo. Still no Twitter data yet (the big source), but you can imagine that when Geolocation is ready, they may just do that.

The Perfect App To Start Your Weekend Off With A Drink – Or Several Drinks. Fast.

I love the fact that Power Music Hour, a new app for the iPhone, never once mentions drinking in its App Store page description. But anyone who has been to college in the past decade will know exactly what this app is for: A drinking game.

A “Power Hour” is a game in which you must drink one shot of beer every minute for an hour (there are variations). Yes, that’s 60 shots of beer. Yes, that will get you very, very drunk. But again, this app never once mentions drinking in its description, and instead implies that it may just be fun to listen to music for a minute at a time. I love it.

Then I dove into the App Store and looked at some other “Power Hour” apps — there are a ton of them. And hilariously, none seem to mention drinking at all. One, Hour of Power, has a description that even reads as follows:

Ever needed a one minute timer to pace yourself while listening to music? With Hour of Power, you can play one minute of any artists, albums, songs, or playlists from your iPod.

When exercising, you can use your music to tell you when to switch weights or activities. When jogging, you can use it to tell you when to change speeds.

Exercising? Jogging? Ha!

We all know what these apps are for, even if they found a rather brilliant loophole in Apple’s App approval system: Simply create a drinking game app, don’t mention the drinking part, and you’ll get a nice 4+ rating, rather than a much more restrictive one (or possibly even rejection).

But we’re going to focus on Power Music Hour because at least they were honest in their email to us about the app:

Howdy TechCrunchers,

Hope you’re all having a lovely week, but in case you’re not we’d like to give you the opportunity to forget all those blog posts you were meaning to post and take a sec to check out our new app, the perfect companion to a 30-rack and an office full of writers.

Let us kindly introduce Power Music Hour, the best (if not first) power hour application for the iPhone & iPod Touch.

So take a load off, grab your favorite drink(s), and enjoy yourself. Hey, your lunch break is an hour long, right?

The app itself is great as a Power Hour app. It takes the music that on your iPhone or iPod touch and cycles through it in 60-second intervals (you can also make it longer or shorter). There is then an audible “ding” when that minute is up, and the song changes.

Back in the day, we used to have to use a stop watch to do Power Hours, this is much, much better!

Find Power Music Hour in the App Store here. It is $0.99. Please drink responsibly. Or, please listen to music for a minute at a time responsibly. While jogging. Or whatever.