SXSW: Day Four
Today was a very gray and very rainy day. The sun managed to poke out late in the afternoon, but for most of the day it was just cold and wet.
The rain and thunder this morning apparently made for some soothing white noise, so much so that I slept through my alarm and had to hustle to make it to the first event of the day at 10:00. In my haste, I left my camera in the car and couldn’t go back to reclaim it until lunch. So not as many pictures today.
Today was a little more of a typical convention day – no visits to towers of crap or rowdy keynote crowds. I sat around a lot, listened to speakers and hopefully learnt quite a bit.
Going Social Now - Shiv Singh from Avenue A | Razorfish gave a pretty enthusiastic talk about social media and how it pretty much changes all the known laws of business, society and physics. Well, maybe not physics. But his point was that social media identities for companies and organizations outlast individual campaigns and have to be cultivated differently.
Social Networking and Your Brand – This one was a panel discussion with four or five people, and it was kind of just a lighter ‘for dummies’ version of the previous presentation. It was a little more nuts-and-bolts oriented and probably a little more useful too.
Lunch- $7 for a panini sandwich and a scoop of potato salad. Plus $3 for a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Gotta love concession monopolies.
Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again? – I skipped today’s keynote to attend this panel, and I’m glad I did. It was so crowded that tons of guys (perhaps literally) were seated in the aisles.
It featured major players from three of the four top browsing platforms – Microsoft’s IE, Mozilla’s Firefox and the Opera family of platforms. Conspicuously absent was Apple and their Safari and iPhone browsers, something that the panelists brought up and hammered pretty frequently.
The three browser boys tried to put a happy face on their heated discussion, but its obvious that years of friction between the parties have resulted in some pretty significant grudges. They all seemed to indicate that moving towards W3C standards was the ultimate goal, but Microsoft seems to only be willing to do that when it suits them. Plenty of talk about mobile browsers – a little too much, in fact. I would have preferred that the panel have spent less time on mobile issues (which are important) and more time on non-mobile browsers (which are still more important).
And someone (actually, a guy from that University of Florida that I had struck up a conversation with earlier) asked what it will take for all browsers to handle simple CSS styling in the same fashion. The panelists laughed, gave some “we all need to love one another” quotes and then failed to really answer the question. I’m not expecting true total cross-browser interoperability any time soon.
Design Eye for South By – In this panel, a group of super designers teamed up to create a theoretical redesign for SXSW’s own online registrant directory. In past years, they’ve done the same thing for several other high profile sites.
This one was kind of derailed by some early A/V problems and a stubborn audience member during the Q&A period, but I think they had some good overall ideas about changing the overall purpose of the directory. Unfortunately, even they admitted that they didn’t address some big issues because of time constraints or because they were too difficult to solve easily. Kind of a let down from what I had been expecting, but it’s good to know that even gurus sometimes don’t have all the answers.
Building Portable Social Networks- The final panel of the day was sparsely attended, but actually turned out to be pretty good. A group of five folks discussed the problems of having to create identities and rebuild connections for each new online application one joins, like Facebook, MySpace, flickr and last.fm.
What if they could all share data about you, your contacts and the things you create online? How would that work? Is it already underdevelopment? What privacy problems does that create? Is it even really a problem for the majority of users? Is the problem keeping users from spreading their wings online?
All these questions were asked and answered to varying degrees. What I got out of it is that some marriage of OpenID and OAuth will probably be the way most people opt to go in the future. Or at least they should, according to the panelists. Ultimately, the issues involved aren’t technical, they’re societal and society will have to set the parameters for sharing and protecting personal data.
And then I was supposed to go the facebook party this evening, but I figured I’ve already been to enough evening events where it was too loud and too crowded to really talk to anyone. So I came back to the hotel and watched some television while researching online about the people and concepts I heard about today.
And now, time for sleep. Zzzzzzzzz…
