Overheard In Providence

The best thing about SXSW Interactive is getting to hang out with other conference goers at well-funded parties throughout Austin. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Austin is home to an impressive number of spacious bars and music venues, and since it’s warm, many of these feature large outdoor spaces. Club de Ville, which hosted the blogger.com party, is a prime example, as is The Mohawk, which hosted frrvrr.com’s launch party concert. I showed up late to that concert, so I still don’t know what frrvrr.com actually does (perhaps after I post this, I’ll click I’ve provided and find out).

At Club de Ville, I was excited to run into two fellow brown alumni who are hard at work on fluther.com, an alternative to yahoo answers. Fluther was recently featured as a “staff pick” on apple.com, so it sounds like things are going well. I’m hoping their success inspires my housemate and I to finally get our act together and start upgrading dearinter.net.

Besides parties, cocktails, and not getting enough sleep, SXSW also featured a variety of interesting speakers and panels. (It also featured the largest concentration of iPhone users outside of one infinity loop.) I attended only a tiny fraction of these talks. Here are a few on which I feel qualified to comment.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote

As you may have read, this interview went terribly. Mark (CEO of Facebook) is a tough person to interview, but the audience was also overwhelmingly frustrated with interviewer Sarah Lacy’s chitchat style of questioning. Eventually, the crowd revolted and Mark started taking questions from the audience. Some folks not in attendance blamed the anit-Sarah sentiment on sexism and twitter, but I respectfully disagree.

As I commented on techcrunch, Sarah came across as belittling to Mark, she interrupted him a lot, she told personal anecdotes that didn’t go anywhere, she awkwardly plugged her book, and she even accidently announced Facebook’s release in France before Mark got a chance to. Also, when almost the entire audience decided to voice its frustration through applause, she made the mistake of fighting back. At SXSW interactive the crowd is filled with Facebook aficionados, and as a result standards were high. I think Sarah’s approach to this interview was seriously flawed, and I don’t feel bad about the audience backlash, which in the end resulted in a far more “interactive” interview.

Complaints aside, interesting topics did come up. Sarah suggested that a lot of people at Facebook were frustrated by Mark’s decision not to sell Facebook to Yahoo. When he turned down an offer of $1 billion, Facebook only had about 100 employees (now there are 500), so everyone of them could have made out very well.

From what I’ve heard, Facebookers tend to stand behind their fearless leader, but I wish Sarah had also asked about internal frustration regarding Facebook’s overly ambitious release of Beacon. Beacon is a “social advertising system” whereby a Facebook user’s activity on another website (for example, a purchase on amazon) is announced to their friends on Facebook. Shortly after Beacon’s release, their was significantly backlash due to concerns over privacy. I have to imagine that some folks at Facebook foresaw these problems.

On a more positive note, Mark mentioned that a lot of social good may one day come out of Facebook’s ability to tie people together. He even suggested that allowing people to stay connected with a wider network of people can help quell terrorism. More convincingly, he pointed out that recent impromptu political protests in Columbia wer organized on Facebook. I spoke with a student from Columbia outside of Club De Ville and he agreed that a Facebook-enabled protest of hundreds of thousands of people (organized in a weekend) was indeed a revolutionary.

Frank Warren’s Keynote

Frank Warren is the creator of postsecret.com, a wildly successful website which posts anonymous secrets sent in via postcard. The site is quite minimal, basically just the cards and some occasional words of wisdom, courtesy of Frank. The site has no ads, but it has lead to four books. It has also raised a substantial amount for the a national suicide prevention hotline. Some of the site’s postcards even found their way into an All-American Rejects video.

Postsecret got started as a project for Aromatic, a multimedia arts event in Washington D.C. After the exhibit was finished, Frank kept getting secrets in the mail, so he started the website. Over at passiveaggressivenotes.com, Kerry and I also rely on user submitted notes, but the whole affair has a very different tone. When Frank speaks, he seems genuinely taken with the emotional world of personal secrets, fears and regrets that he’s stumbled into. He takes his position quite seriously, and many in the audience seemed genuinely touched by the messages of his site. Several audience members even revealed their own secrets, and their was even a marriage proposal. In short, it was a very engaging presentation, although my female friends agreed that surprise public proposals are simply not the way to go.

Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson’s Opening Remarks

Henry Jenkins, codirector of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, brought up a number of interesting topics, but overall the conversation was fairly scattered, so I won’t try for a summary. Instead I’ll just plug We Are Wizards, a documentary Henry was interviewed for which documents the whirlwind of creativity centered around Harry Potter. Besides inspiring many folks to write stories of their own, many wizard rock bands now exist.

Web Awards

As I already mentioned, there was a ceremony at the Hilton hosted by Eugene Merman and passiveaggressivenotes.com won best blog. Kerry was a little nervous so she forgot to thank me, but I’m told I may get mentioned in her interview for the webawards podcast. (You can also find all of the SXSW interactive podcasts here.)

The OpenID Panel

OpenID is an open standard created so an internet enthusiast like yourself can use the same username and password across multiple websites. For example, you can already use your Yahoo username (since Yahoo is an openID provider) to leave comments on blogger.com blogs. I have plenty to say about openID, but this post is getting ridiculously long, so I’m going to write about the openID panel (and possibly this panel on social network data portability) some other time. Trust me, it’ll be more interesting than it sounds.

Other Stuff

Icanhascheezburgr now employs 9 employeez! Also, the designers at Apple are meticulous.