FanSnap: A New Way To Buy Tickets Online

There are certain things that creep up on you in life without any clear warning or advance notice.

My beer-gut is one of them. The real estate bust is another. One more to add to the list is the rise of TicketMaster as the dominant player in online event ticketing. From a concert to a Broadway show, it always seemed like TicketMaster pretty much had a monopoly in this space.

So in the spirit of competition, entrepreneurship and the good old fashioned American dream I'm using today's post to showcase a new ticketing site called FanSnap.

Firstly, before I can even continue with this review there's something I need to get off my chest.....something that could potentially taint every post that emanates from my weary pen. I like simplicity. In fact I don't just like simplicity, I think it's a pre-requisite for any genuinely useful Web experience. From Google and Amazon to Wikipedia and E-Bay, the best performing sites on the Web have always been the simplest.

That's one of the main reasons why I like FanSnap. The homepage is a relatively barren affair - free of all the Ticketmaster bloat and one where the user simply has to enter the name of the event they are searching for.

After performing your search - let's say "Britney Spears" - FanSnap returns a list of dates and venues, putting those that are close to your physical location at the top of the screen (the site is able to automatically detect your location).

Choose a location and FanSnap searches a variety of ticket merchants for availability. Once the search is complete you can view a simple list of all the tickets available, or use a rather spiffy interactive map of the event venue to browse different ticket prices by clicking on the relevant point on the map. This is a great way to see if the box-office seat is really worth 199 bucks more than the mezzanine lower-left and the map really lets you get an interesting perspective on the venue.

Another very useful feature is the ability to refine your search based on minimum and maximum price. If you don't want to pay more than 60 big ones for a ticket to see Celine Dion then simply move the "maximum price" slider to "60" and your search will be refined in real time. After you've made your selection, simply choose your ticket and FanSnap links you out to the source site to make your purchase.

FanSnap's user interface is simple, graceful and intuitive and it's definitely worth checking out as an alternative to TicketMaster - which is my mind is in desperate need of some meaningful competition.