SXSWi photos are up

Although they're not much to look at.

Twitter at SXSWi

One of the first things I noticed when walking into the lobby on Friday was a big screen showing icons floating from left to right, displaying thought bubbles. This display was courtesy of Twitter, a social networking site that consists entirely of redirecting IMs and text messages to group displays. In practice, this means that people would text or IM their thoughts to Twitter during the sessions and those thoughts would show up on the big screen in the hall outside. They would also be broadcast to friends of those people.

Great, but what on earth is it useful for? In a convention context, it could have been useful if I had been trying to coordinate activities with a small cadre of friends. Suppose that my friends and I are attending different sessions. If my session is not good, I text that fact to Twitter. If it's great, I text that instead. The result: we can loosely coordinate swarming without making disruptive voice calls or individually setting up texting lists. (SXSWi is much looser than academic conferences about changing rooms.)

But there's an analogous but much more direct application. Last night I was at the Lifehacker party and I started getting Twitter traffic reporting on the various parties. The traffic mostly had to do with (a) which parties were lame and (b) which parties had free drinks. Let's call it a "beer swarm." And this use was even better, since texting is much preferable to voice calls in a loud party context and since these texts are applicable to a far wider range of friends. There's your killer app. I don't think that Twitter will take off in an office context, but in contexts where you have to silently coordinate an all-channels network, it fits the bill.

Recovering from SXSW

I've been at South by Southwest Interactive since Friday evening, and am just exhausted. As usual, conferences that take place in one's home town are harder than conferences located elsewhere, since you have to make rapid transitions and divide your attentions. But I was still able to attend some great panels (and some not-so-great ones), meet some great people, and think a lot about the future of mediated interaction.

Since I won't be going to CCCC/ATTW next week, I'll be taking the next week and a half to digest what went on, summarize my notes, and add some thoughts on SXSW. It's a really interesting conference, with much more vendor stuff than you normally see at academic conferences, some surprising depth in some areas, and some surprising thinness in others. All in all, it was invigorating, and I'll probably go again.

SXSWi posts will be tagged "sxswi2007."