Thoughts About SXSW 2008

posted at 5:32 pm
on Mar. 17, 2008

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Did I really go?

Time flies.  It just does.  Life’s short, and getting shorter.  No matter how fast I can pop popcorn in the microwave or fill up a tank of gas or have pizza delivered, time just keeps on zipping by, and, like TiVo, I’m also getting better and better at fast forwarding through the “boring” parts.

Where was I?  Oh yes, Austin.  For South by Southwest, the annual uber-tribal gathering of social Web designers and developers.

Susie, Matt and I headed down together, and Shane Birley of LeftRightMinds came along as well.

The size of the conference was, to my untrained eye, perhaps doubled this year.  I figured that, since I’ve gone for several years now, and since I know more and more people who are going (i.e. the Vancouver Mafia), that I’d meet fewer people.

But in fact the opposite was true.  Not only did I meet more people this year, but the people I did meet, the majority were attending for the first time.

With all those new people, I also worried that the conference would “jump the shark” a bit as well, but that wasn’t the case at all. Not only were the panels excellent, but the quality of the people in the halls and the parties was still high.

And by high, I mean: smart, doing interesting projects, and for the most part, not huckster-ish self-promotion. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of bravado and new projects launching, but the energy powering it is still a wide-eyed “gee-whiz,” check out this thing called “Twitter”, and not a jaded “let’s reach additional marketshare and penetrating a new vertical by rebranding this product with new social features” attitude.

I also had many, many good meals that are hard to find in Vancouver, mostly built around re-fried beans and red sauce.

It was definitely colder this year, but not as rainy as last, and the parties were as off-the-hook as ever.  One bad note: Facebook, your invite process sucked, and if it was 1/100th as hard to join your site as it was to get into your party, you’d only have 8,000 members today.  The buzz around Facebook I heard at SXSW was almost uniformly downbeat: privacy issues, leadership issues, valuation issues, “spam” issues*.  If it wasn’t already such a juggernaut, I’d be worried about it.

* “spam” because it’s not really a spam issues being discussed, it’s attention-interruption and useful app development issues.

Oh, and Susie’s book reading went well, but was as sparsely attended as you’d expect the first session of the day on the last day would be.  No one at SXSW gets up early, and by early, the first session’s just at 10 a.m.

So, that’s my round up.  Photos come later, when I have time.

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