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The South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival has come and gone here in Austin, Texas. One of the most buzzed about topics was group messaging. I did some research about these new services, mainly Kik and GroupMe.

After spending a couple days at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW or "South by," as the hipsters call it), my theory that there's a social app for everything is confirmed. While 99% of these social apps seem to add to the chaos of online living, one stood out as simplifying things: GroupMe . There are a lot of others jumping into this space including Mogwee ( owned by Ning ), Twilio , Beluga ( acquired by Facebook ), and numerous others

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If SXSW serves as a barometer of all trends hot in tech, then group messaging and texting apps are one of the hottest trends--even by Austin, Texas, standards. These days, I can't open my email without seeing yet another pitch plaguing my inbox touting some slight variation on the group messaging formula.

One day last summer Jared Hecht’s fiancée was complaining that she had no good way to coordinate her friends in real time at a Red Rocks music festival. “I called up my friend Steve and said, how do we make this possible?” A week later Hecht, who turned 24 today, and cofounder Steve Martocci, 28, had built a prototype of their group texting service, GroupMe , at a 24-hour hackathon.