SXSW Interactive Recap

Today, my SXSW experience comes to an end.  With this, I return to my daily life a more enlightened person.  This is an annual phenomenon for me.  At an event like this, you experience an idea overload.   This experience works in unison with sleep deprivation.  This is SXSW.  The discussions about new technologies, ideas and how we can change the world through the digital medium starts early in the morning and goes late into the night.  You reunite with old friends.  You make new friends.  If you have ideas, you have a countless number of ears to spill your ideas to.  For five days this is Disneyland for many of us.

I can go on and on, waxing poetic about SXSW, but to save you any further revelry, I will outline some of the things I will take from this year’s SXSW:

• 10,000 tech geeks in a 10 block radius, 80% using iPhones will cripple AT&T’s 3G network
• Guy Kawasaki is now synonymous with spam
• A bigger Nashville presence this year than last (but we do have work to do)
• No controversy this year close to last year’s Zuckerberg-Lacy debacle
• I’ll get to speak on a panel next year
• The world is here (at least Europe, hello friends)
• The tech community is increasingly going Mac.  Last year was 70%/30% Macs to PCs.  This year is closer to 90/10.
• If you have either a client that you represent at SXSW, this is an excellent opportunity to get together in a laid back setting where all the layers can be easily cut through and you can establish much better conversations as a result.
• If you need a job and don’t mind moving, you could get one here.  A guy overheard my conversation and came up and within 5 minutes was trying to recruit me to move to Portland.  Sorry, I am neither A. Moving to Portland or B.  Interested in taking your job.
• The more times you use #sxsw on Twitter, the more envy you build up amongst your followers who did not attend.
• Zappos is a great company to work for and buy from, but when you attend a Tony Hsieh keynote, expect the same general discussion he always leads - customer service is #1, everything else follows.  Don’t be disappointed by this, its his deal, you should know to expect it…
• Seeing certain high profile technorati shitfaced on 6th Street is another experience unique to SXSW
• Crutches suck at SXSW - Just ask Scott Gordon (http://www.theantipimp.com)

Go ahead and make a commitment to be here next year.  And keep these tips in mind as you plan your 2010 SXSW experience:

1. Pay the extra coin to stay within walking distance on downtown and the convention center
2. Don’t forget your power cords (Phone chargers, etc)
3. Bring a powerstrip.  You will be everybody’s friend.
4. If you are introverted, find a way to be an extrovert for a few days.  It makes all the difference.
5. Use tools like Twitter to connect with fellow attendees before the conference begins
6. 1st day of SXSW is not mandatory, but stay until Tuesday afternoon
7. The accelerator event at the Hilton has tons of free Startup T’s - take full advantage

I hope you start planning your 2010 SXSW now.   I have already started mine.  How to see you here next year!

Facebook’s Envy for Twitter

I made a comment on Twitter the other day that Facebook wants to be Twitter and Twitter wants to be Facebook.  What I meant by this statement is that Twitter has a more robust community conversation stream.  Facebook simply can’t match it because the social graph, as defined by Facebook, has inherent walls that prevent a wide open conversation.  Only your friends can follow your conversations on Facebook, and by befriending people on Facebook, you are opening more of your life up to those followers than you would on Twitter.

Twitter wants the user trust that Facebook has.  Twitter is increasingly appealing to spammers because you can reach a mass audience very quickly.  Phishing techniques and blackhat apps have also added some spam to the community.  Facebook is very successful in combatting these tactics.  The absence of this element has given Facebook a distinct advantage of former social networking juggernaut MySpace. Today, Facebook has functionality superiority over Twitter.  It would be much easier for Facebook to emulate Twitter than for Twitter to emulate Facebook.

So, will the changes that Facebook made to their homepage this week take them into the direction of becoming Twitter?  I don’t think so.  What I believe Facebook has to do to create a Twitter-like environment is introduce a new layer that allows members to follow other members without committing to a full friendship.  This would then create an identical environment on Facebook and through this new interface, a user could follow others that they may not actually know in real life and build an online friendship through this communication that could then progress into a full Facebook friendship.

I believe this is a practical approach to Facebook’s dilemma.  I am interested in what you think about the matter.

Twitter… Expanded.

I enjoy Twitter. I am more of a microblogger than a blogger. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to write blogs the way I can write tweets. Many people are this way. Time doesn’t permit many of us to write blogs. Others just don’t have the chops to write 300+ word articles about whatever it is that they have to say. This is beauty and charm of Twitter. You can blog without blogging. You can contribute with minimal time invested.

There is a small gap that I think Twitter misses. You see, Twitter is a concept based off cross communication between web and mobile interfaces. A Twitter user can just as easily communicate using SMS (or text message for the less technically inclined readers out there) as you could use the Twitter website itself to add an update. With this interface comes restrictions that are necessary to make the platform compatible with text messaging. SMS requires an individual message to be 160 characters or less. As a result, Twitter has to limit its message lengths to 140 characters. This limits what we can say. We may not have a lot to say but what we want to say may exceeed 140 characters.

Today, many of us use iphones, blackberrys or other web enabled mobile devices to communicate via email or even through a mobile application. The group of people who are forced to communicate remotely with Twitter via SMS is shrinking everyday. So my question is this. At some point does it not make sense for Twitter or another service to offer an expanded character service. I am not saying open ended, but 200 characters instead of 140 characters really can change the game in a way that is not overbearing but enabling for a user to complete say his message without truncating it. If not expanding from 140 characters on public updates, at least letting the direct messages be open ended. These messages can now be delivered to users through email an application on their mobile devices.

So, is there another servicing lurking in the shadows, awaiting the opportunity to rise up and seize on what could be perceived as Twitter’s blind spot or is this a notion that is off base?

I Finally Got an iPhone

After refraining to cave into the hype that surrounded the original iPhone, I finally gave in and got one. As a pure programmer and technology junkie, I always stay away from first releases. Whether it is iPhone, Windows Vista or the next generation Blackberry, I always take a wait and see approach. After exercising that philosophy on the first generation iPhone, I sit here today with the 3G in hand, adding apps as fast as the phone can download them. So far I have added apps for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, my Bank of America checking account and so much more. In the next day or two I am going to give a full review of the new apps. In the meantime, I will be enjoying the new phone!

Internet Addiction & How We Combat It

As the chief architect for a social networking website that caters to recovering alcoholics and addicts, I understand the power of addiction pretty well. I see its effects everyday. Addiction can tear its way through the lives of those addicted and close relatives and friends. It is a disease that really doesn’t care who you are, where you live, what shape you’re in or what economic class you belong to. Most addictions have pretty big teeth and once it gets its fangs into you, its a struggle to break free.

Substance abuse is the most common of all addictions on SoberCircle.com. But, within the core of most participants of this website are addictive personalities that can become hooked on more than just addictive substances. I get to see the nature of addiction much more closely than most web developers because our website caters to it, but addiction exists everywhere. Don’t think for a second that the unrivaled success of porn websites is primarily fueled by anything other than addiction. It exists in varying degrees throughout the internet. Facebook and Myspace might solicit only minor addictive bonds with its users, while gaming websites might have much stronger addictive effects on its users.

Is it a problem?
I would say it has to be a problem. If an addiction to anything causes a person to invest a concerning amount of money or time on a website, there is definite reason for concern. Social disfunctionality is often born from this behavior of becoming absorbed in a website or several websites. It is the same behavior that is created by an addiction to drugs, just with fewer socially unacceptible side effects. I highly doubt internet addiction ever becomes the cause behind armed robberies, carjackings or prostitution. The addiction will cost its victims their jobs, families and quite possibly their sanity.

How do we combat it?
What I am about to suggest is a radical concept for a web 2.0 world where wall street meets silicon valley and promising startups and born everyday with the aspirations of being the next big thing. For any website that subscribes members to it, that member count and their activity is a very important thing. My suggestion would be to allow a member if they feel they are addicted to a website, they can easily unsubscribe or take a timeout. Addicts often know they might have a problem, even if they would never admit it. Allowing an internet addict to take a siesta would not only be healthy for the user, it would probably be healthy for the website as well. We as web developers want to build websites that fuse with real life. When people become addicted to your site, they slowly start to withdraw from the reality that is life. Based on my experience with SoberCircle, there are many other issues that form from a members constant involvement with the website. An undue sense of entitlement can form that cause members to clash with each other or the website’s management.

Would websites adopt this policy of encouraging healthy internet use? Its contradictory to what most websites are trying to accomplish, but in the end the karma gained by the few lost hits would probably more than make up for it.

SXSW

Its day 3 of SXSW Interactive and I have to say I’ve found some of the sessions very beneficial and informative. Other sessions have been a complete waste of time. Then we have the keynote today from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As a social networking community developer, I was really looking forward to this. What a disappointment. A complete debacle.

I’ve gotten more out of the social scene than anything else, meeting a lot of cool people along the way. Next time, I think I will spend half as much time in sessions and twice as much time at the parties. As everyone who knows me can attest, I have a lot of ideas. This is the place to explore those ideas and the potential they hold. Many of the industry leaders today were here just a few years ago exploring those ideas as well. Most of them still use the experience sxsw provides to enhance concepts.

I am tired, but I am inspired.

The magic that is iPhone

So, as a director of I.T. I get to mess with a lot of tech toys I wouldn’t fool with otherwise. My latest encounter was the iPhone. My initial impressions are mixed. On one hand, it is an ipod married with a cell phone which I can once remember saying “I love the ipod, but if they could ever put my cell phone into an ipod, then we’d have it made”. On the other hand, it is a technology that is still flawed. Don’t get me wrong, it could be A LOT worse, but the keypad alone was annoying enough to turn me off. But, as I was saying, my boss had to have one, so he put me in charge of getting it set up. Which I did, with limited difficulty. But the damn keypad. Its the only hangup so far, and it is a really big one for me. We’ll see how my boss does with it.

Bottomline: Not worth waiting 2 days in line for.