These aren’t the tidiest notes, and I even failed on jotting down exactly who was speaking but there are a few useful points in there… Thanks to Lionel for the insight on how Dell dealt with feedback in the early days.
The Future of Corporate Blogs
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I wasn’t so hot on this panel, found there was a lot of navel-gazing and not enough direction. Also, I don’t know what world these guys live in but do they not also have to contend with marketing, business dev, crazy bosses with wild ideas? There was no discussion about how to integrate the real-life demands into collaborative processes. Nice people, but rubbish panel.
Creative Collaboration: Designers and Developers working together
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For this panel, I ditched the laptop and only used pen and paper so my notes are less than clear. In fact, I’m lucky if I can read my own handwriting, but the highlights for me were finally meeting the lovely Tara Hunt, a fellow Canadian expat and inspirational blogger.
My notes might be a bit garbled but sue me, I was too busy listening.
“Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet
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The notes from this panel are pretty thorough - it was one of the first panels I attended and I was pretty enthusiastic with the typing. Interesting findings, but the main takeaway for me is that these kids are clever and pretty discerning, we need to give them a whole lot more credit than we (or I) currently do!
“What teens like online and on their phones”
Panel of teens from age 11-17, based in the Austin area and of different levels of interest in technology, music, etc…
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Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users
For this panel, I’ll admit my notes were a bit patchy and I relied on a few other ppl’s notes to improve them. I was too mesmerised by Kathy’s talk to worry so much about notes. But read on anyways…
I’ve also borrowed a few of Kathy’s images to illustrate for those who weren’t so lucky as to attend. They’re completely her copyright, ownership and what not. (They rock!)
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Since I attended SXSW last week, I thought it’d be the right thing to do to share my notes from panels. They’re incomplete, I’ve probably interpreted some statements wrongly, there are probably plenty of typos. But I felt I’d be a complete shmuck if I didn’t do the community thang and shared my notes.
So if you’re not interested, apologies about the next few posts, which will each summarise a panel. At the end, I’ll try to add links to other (better) coverage of the same panels to give the bigger picture. If you’ve taken notes or have something to add (like videos!), just leave a comment and I’ll include it in my post.
First off, the “A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?” panel notes…
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South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.
Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?
Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.
So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.
I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?
[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]
This evening, looking at the activity on Twitter, I was fascinated to see how quickly the usual Jaiku crowd had migrated. For those who haven’t noticed, Jaiku was showing a big fat 502 Bad Gateway error for a number of hours before it was replaced by the Jaiku birdie telling us that busted hard drives were to blame for the downtime.
Now, Twitter is notoriously flaky and known for going up and down more than a kid’s see-saw in a busy park in midsummer. Yet, everyone flocked over as the default alternative to Jaiku. If it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been something else. Pownce? Facebook? Seesmic?
In a magpie-like fashion, the web 2.0 crowd will look for the next shiny thing. I know. I’m one of them, and I sure as hell am guilty for chronically creating accounts on every new service, just to promptly ditch it and move on.
So what makes a service people come back to? A site that makes it past the 12-18 months “best before” date? Or are all new web 2.0′ish services destined to peak quickly then die just as fast? Lots more thoughts to add on this, but first, I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks.
I’ll leave you on this thought… What if Twitter and Jaiku were down at the same time? Would the world collapse? Or would everyone’s productivity increase by 200%?
For now, I must go tweet about how sick I am of packing boxes. It’s more bearable than it was some years ago but it still bites.
Jaiku, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube x2 accounts, Revver, Metacafe, reddit, 43places, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Vox, Tipped, Dopplr, Fuelmyblog, Stumbleupon, Pownce, Squidoo, TripIt, LinkedIn, Upcoming, Mybloglog, Technorati and probably more I can’t think of right now…
Just a few of the social networks I frequent more or less regularly. Scary to think how much competition there is for our already limited time.
After a number of interesting panels in the day, it was time for beers and Diggnation.
Think of being 10 years old and looking up to your biggest, most favourite music star. Now imagine the excitement if you were told you’d get to meet them. That’s how I felt yesterday.
I filmed a good part of the live Diggnation show (which I’ll put online tonight), but then the guys bravely took on the mobs of 16 year olds and joined the Carsonified party at the Excel pub. Once the crowds went home, only a few people were left. But surprise, while Kevin buggered off to the hotel, Alex and the Totally Rad Show guys stayed for some drinks! Having a chat with them, they’re just as lovely as I’d hoped.
If this kind of event and show format is the future of TV, I’m going to feel right at home.
Matthew Haughey, MetaFilter says…
“Be the third place; people have home, work and a third community or social attachment. This can be a car enthusiast club, a WoW guild or a website community. Make something they’ll want to spend time on everyday.”
I’m at the Future of Web Apps in London today. So far, I’ve attended the intro keynote with Om Malik and Michael Arrington, followed by Heather Champ & Derek Powazek on “We’ve got this community: Now what?”. I’m now in Tony Conrad’s “Future of Search”.
The main running thread of all talks so far is quite clear: Nobody knew what would happen next after launching their app. And in fact, few ended up where they expected to go. Someone this morning said that the real work on a web app really begins after you launch (see, I was listening, but didn’t take note so not sure who said this…) You need to listen intently, watch your users and see what they make of it. Odds are you’ll notice that they’ve hacked your app and use it in ways you would never have imagined. That’s your cue to harness their creativity and evolve accordingly.
Sometimes, Web 2.0 big names can get a bit cocky about success, but I think this is one point everyone agrees on: You just don’t know what’s going to happen next when you launch a startup.
On Thursday, I got annoyed enough with my half-assed Twitter username, and not getting a response from the team that I made a blog post out of it.
The next morning, I woke up to find a response to my feature request from 6th August from Crystal at Twitter:
Hello Vero,
Thanks for your email, apologies for the delay. We do this for the sake of ease. The limit on characters is mainly for SMS purposes; each message you send will include the user name associated with your number. Twitter messages have a 140 character limit, and a minimum of 10 characters is your phone number; adding 15 characters for a user name to 10 characters minimum for a phone number would be at least 25 of 140 characters. A long user name will also make it difficult for people to direct text you from their phones. Sorry about that! Can we send you a t shirt to make up for it?
Thanks,
Crystal
So there it is, I won’t get my full username back, which means I’ll continue to miss most @replies unless I change my username altogether. Part of why I’m making a big deal out of this is out of curiosity to see what it would take to get a response, but also because it strikes me as a bit of a lazy fix to truncate usernames of legacy users to 15chars retrospectively. Oh well, I still love Twitter.
As for the tshirt, I’m a sucker for schwag, so hopefully Twitter will send it to me even though I’m not based in the US.
