Anttenna

Combining things makes them stronger, as evidenced by Voltron, especially after they got rid of, ugh, Sven. Going Voltron on three super popular web-services: Anttenna.

Conceived at a concert last summer when a local UW grad got pissed there wasn't an app that could help him find the cheapest nearby brew vendor, this free location-based iPhone app re-conceives classifieds by combining the functionality of Craigslist, Foursquare, and Twitter into mobile, real-time "microlistings", like whenever Spud Webb attempts to sell his house. Here's how it works: post something you have for sale to the supply chain, or something you want to the demand chain; or search other peoples listings by keyword, category, location, or proximity; you can also use the map option to figure out how close said seller/buyer is, making it super easy to find someone selling a sofa you don't have to lug far, or a kid that you won't have to put back on a plane to Russia in case you don't like the cut of his jib. To facilitate deal making, Ant enables private, instantaneous user-to-user communication, or "Anttweeting‟, via a system built on the Twitter platform, and it keeps original listings micro by limiting the number of characters (take a note, You Can't Do That on Television locker joke sequences!).

This nascent service only has a thousand or so users in the 4 left coast cities (including Seattle) where it's available, but future plans include a nation-wide rollout, and versions of the app for Palm, Blackberry, as well as one for Android, an OS named for the robot, which -- when combined with its non-existent sense of humor -- still makes better Lion-to-Lion banter than Sven.