SXSW Madness
Every year about this time Austin is invaded by what seems like everyone. Last year I heard folks make a comments and there was even a twitter post to the effect of “The valley is empty, looks like everyone is at SXSW.”
Twitter is a buzz with all of the SXSW tweets going on out there.
Jeremy is one of the co-organizers of the AustinTweetup party tomorrow night. I will be attending, I am committing myself to the party, in that I have gone ahead and taken the following morning off. Which actually might work out as a two birds with one stone.
Len Edgerly of the Kindle Chronicles is in town for SXSW and has put the word out to all of his faithful listeners (like Gina and myself) that he would like to grab coffee while he is in town, around 10am or so. It would be really cool to meet up with Len. I think I will be able to make it to a 10am coffee, though it might be 10am BenBen time, which is more like 10:30am here in the real world.
I am surprised and yet not that surprised that Len also has a twitter account. It seems like everyone is getting into the groove of well, for lack of a better term ‘Social Media’. At a recent Tweetup, I participated in a brief discussion about whether Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are all in the same space, the topic started with a reference to one being better than the others.
To me Twitter is not even remotely the in the same space as LinkedIn or Facebook. And I also do find it kind of funny that MySpace was completely left out of the discussion. If memory serves, everyone (and by which I mean mainstream media) was all about MySpace.
Businesses saw it as a way to advertise to the youth who had gotten hooked on it. And they began to create MySpace accounts. Then Facebook came out of being strictly just for college kids and opened up to everyone. LinkedIn had already been out by that point (I should do some fact checking, but I am fairly positive LinkedIn was already out and about before Facebook opened up to the ‘public’).
LinkedIn was basically a business networking site, oriented towards helping professionals network. While Facebook, in my opinion was originally oriented towards reuniting with old classmates (you know like say Classmates.com), except that Facebook also had that hint of ‘What are you up to now’ in it, not just a historical “I went to this school” aspect.
Maybe that “What are you up to now” was what helped them transition from a purely a college student site to a mainstream site. Their ‘platform play’ I think is what helped them attract and keep the businesses, the idea that Facebook was not just a networking site but a platform to build apps ontop of, to integrate with your business, that is a powerful concept.
Then you have Twitter, which to me is more about communication, real-time communication. While, both Facebook and LinkedIn (and MySpace, and Classmates.com or any othe social networking site) has built-in mail and even IM style clients. Twitter (to me) is about communication.
The term mico-blogging doesn’t do it justice, I think to say that it is a smaller form of another means of communication is crap (i.e. micro or small blog). Twitter is a new form of communication, much the same way that IM was different enough IRC to not be called ‘Person-Person IRC’.
Twitter has been growing in popularity for the last couple of years. The last few blog entries on Rands In Repose have been about Twitter. Talking about the finer points of how to write a tweet and whom to follow.
Anyway, I have been futzing with the Twitter API, in doing so I have been running a search on SXSW on twitter. In just a few minutes the number of NEW tweets about “SXSW” has jumped to over 700.
And with that, I close out the SXSW Madness!
Laterz