Austin King: SXSW First Timer Take-Aways

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tl;dr

I?m back from my first time trip to Austin Tx and SXSW Interactive.

My friend Jeremy Britton from Zurb Interactive inspired me to write up a post on the week. He also told me my cold is SXSW Sars.

Activity Streams Meetup

A highlight for me was the Activity Streams meetup. It filled a huge gap in my research when Chris Messina talked about Activity Theory in Is it getting Streamy in Here. Todd Barnard brought a first edition copy of Yrjö Engeström?s tomb to the meet-up. Mark Krynsky introduced me to Jyri Engeström and I felt like quite a dolt for not knowing this history. I?ve grabbed a copy of Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design and I?ll read it during my trip to Turkey.

Mozilla SXSW Happy Hour Party

Another highlight was the Mozilla Party. Unlike your typical cave dwelling hacker? I actually like some marketing activities and had a blast meeting people and handing out Rock Your Firefox t-shirts. The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge was judged and it was great to meet the hackers. Brian and I finally met face to face and battled for our surname.

Speaking of hackability?

Webhooks / View Source Has A Posse

Jeff Lindsay gave a great talk about how and why you should integrate Webhooks into your web applications. This talk, in true SaturdayHouse fashion, was a jam session that covered all sorts of crazy topics. Some of the best ideas involved enabling the next gen programmers. Where will the BASIC of our next gen be?

It could be the web, because View Source Has A Posse. This was a great discussion on how 90% of internet programmers learned by tinkering. Copy and paste, although a crude first step, is a massively enabling technology. Focusing on performance and programming in the large really threatens the View Source culture. View Source tools need to catch up to deployment tools or we?ll end up with:

It?s like you open the hood of your car and there is another hood under there to open.

The talk was lubricated by Tequila. If any panel members agreed, they had to drink!

Networking while Rome is burning

Okay, I?m a big nerd and went to almost every 9:30am session and consumed talks through 5pm. I talked to dozens and dozens of people who caught one or two sessions a day. Hmm. Weird. I?d skips sessions for BOF and open space style sessions, but 1 or 2 session? I think I?m doing it wrong or SXSW is mostly about getting hammered. I?d rather go to a resort town for that kind of flow. Why be surrounded by marketers and 20k other people in Downtown Austin?

Don?t get me wrong, I?m no tea-tottler and had plenty of Shiner Bock, Austin Amber, and Karaoke till 3am Saturday night? I just still got my learn on most of the week.

This partying is a metaphor for our lack of focusing on what really matters.

Bruce Sterling had a great quote for SXSW. While there is global warming, a financial crisis, and other serious problems to tackle? we?re all walking around with iPhones and networking while Rome burns. A great and classic talk by Sterling, very witty and insightful.

Shiny, Shiny Add Privacy and Security Later

Sterling warned us of the future? where we live in the future we?ve built. ouch. The youth aren?t makers and don?t know what it was like, before we tore down the walls of the old world. They will whine, they will tear us down, and we?ll have to help them move forward without being bitter and grumpy. Ugh, sounds like fun.

He cautions that a world build out of small pieces loosely join will have plenty of rattling bones and bugs.

This was a minor but important theme through my SXSW. Jaron Lanier is both one of us (contemporary technologist) and one of these future whipper snappers, due to accidents of history. He gave a great talk explaining his ideas behind You Are Not a Gadget. The talk was good, because it wasn?t easy to listen to. I got really angry a couple of times and thought? my god this guy doesn?t understand anything about computers. Sadly he knows more than I ever will, but he?s also able to step outside of our status quo and try to keep pushing the ideals of Ted Nelson and to make sure Artists are getting paid and have a place in society. Extremely tough questions and problems.

Something that resonated in Lanier?s talk was that our software isn?t very social and that it?s incredible hard to be a teen in the Facebook world. There?s no space to reinvent yourself while you already crystallized into a profile page and defending your position in the pecking order.

Which leads into another challenger to blind technologists? Dana Boyd?s keynote was excellent. She talked about real world privacy gaffes and the underlying theory of why this happens. She pointed out that when implementing software, privacy isn?t a set it and forget it feature. We have to constantly pay attention to social norms, the interaction of all software features, and the nuances of the data we are exposing. A great example ? making something that is public more public can be a violation of privacy was such a powerful reality check for me.

SXSW, and our larger tech world, is technologists running as fast as they can after the new shiny. That is what we do. We?ll add the privacy and security features on later? along with the business model. Gowalla and Four Square were buzzed to be the most important ideas at SXSW. Let?s chase the geolocation shiny?

Why are we letting 3rd parties collect this data? What is the long term value? For whom? Who do they share it with? For how long?

Context, Filtering and Search

I?m starting to get older. Doh. Now I see the patterns. Chasing the shiny leads to market leaders who flip their startups for big cash. Then these market leaders product will eventually get commoditized or won?t exist because they were built on short term value and there is no reason for them to exist. If we don?t focus on building real services with real long term value. So how could these location check-in?s be of short term value? Advertising, Johnson, Advertising.

The Making content relevant to me session had the best panel. Some key ideas:

• Hunch.com has correlated whether someone likes iceberg lettuce with whether they are Republicans or not and it holds for a surprising number of people
• They know if you?d switch from a PC to a Mac, based on if you?d like to dance
• Douglas Merrill talked about how hard it is to anonymize a dataset, as the Netflix prise dataset was de-anonymised
• Companies are sharing these datasets as Recommendation engines become SaaS
• Every search you make on Google is targeted via 200 axis so the ads will be relevant to you. Turns out geo data is much richer than cookies and HTTP referrers.

Also Sam Altman from the The Life Graph session stated that given 2 or 3 days of Four Square check-ins, you can identify someone with 90% accuracy, because the fingerprint of where people live and work is pretty unique.

I used Gowalla all week and am no Luddite. But we should pause and reflect? We?re building some amazing shiny tools, but to what end?

Synthesis

Lots of other sessions worth mentioning, but I?ll leave off with some ideas.

DEVO?s session was Ironic and revealing. They are devolved genius, so I?d expect no less. They are using all of these advanced marketing technologies to create their next album.

Lots of Open Web sessions. The open web is winning. We web developers missed the boat on the iPhone (before the native SDK) and we better get ready to throw down some View Source on the iPad. We?ve got to keep pushing for better tools and keep choosing open platforms over sterile ones. Why doesn?t the next Adobe CS target HTML5? I meet a lot of potential customers.

Social Networks without SocialObjects are missing the point. Our SocialGraphs are an artifact, not the means to an end. We need to pay attention during every step of building something. We should be mining Sociology to build better social software instead of mining machine learning to build better advertising machines. To end with another Sterling quote: You should?ve open sourced food and shelter first!

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