Why I was Wrong About SxSW

I wrote a post a few weeks ago — it seems so long ago — entitled Why I Am Not Going To SxSW. I was all wrong. Let me explain.

SxSW ia a petri dish for the social, mobile future.

My piece was primarily oriented to the event — the SxSW Interactive conference — and my past experiences as a participant. You know, ‘the rooms are too crowded’, ‘uneven sessions: some great, some terrible’, that sort of thing. I kvetched about the size of the town, everything too cramped… basically treating SxSW as a conference, and comparing it to other conferences.

Again, I was wrong.

SxSW has conferences embedded in its writhing chaos, but they are — sorry, conference organizers — the sideshow.

I wound up being in Austin during SxSW — various clients asked me to meet with them there — and so I wound up being at SxSW for a few days (catching a few meetings here and there) without attending even a single session of the event. So instead of watching people talk about where tech is going, there I was watching tech going.

And I realized that I should have come like an ethnographer, watching people and seeing what they were up to. SxSW ia a petri dish for the social, mobile future.

What did I see? Mobile, mobile everywhere. Much fewer PCs, smart devices, iPads, mobile social apps of all stripes (like Jyri Engstrom’s Ditto). Caroline McCarthy seems to have had the same experience, and she wonders what we can learn:

Caroline McCarthy, At SXSW, a peek at the post-laptop age?

How will this all translate to the “real” world? At SXSW, attendees are social-media lab rats, running around the maze of Austin bars, hotels, and conference rooms equipped with strange, glowing sensors that give them ambiguous signals about where to go and what to do at all hours of the day and night. Most of their quotidian professional routines—which, for most, would involve being at a full-size keyboard at a desktop computer—have come to a standstill. The city’s collective blood alcohol level, I’m willing to wager, is unusually high.

At SXSW, a case could be made that we are, indeed, living in a post-PC world. But SXSW isn’t how the real world runs. When Twitter captured the attention of the tech world at SXSW in 2007, it took well over a year for even the fringes of mainstream culture to catch on—mainly when celebrities realized that it was a great platform for self-promotion. And there, we’re talking about a free Web service, not a major change in the purchasing and productivity habits of millions of people.

The PC isn’t dead. But at SXSW, it’s moribund. And if you consider the annual festival to be a prognosticator of what the digital lifestyle will eventually be—well, then, maybe it’s time to make some predictions for a few years out.

SxSW is an artificial urban experience, with enormous social density, and a population with nothing on their minds but social connections and coordination of activities. It’s a hothouse, an artificial ecology where the number of connections that can be acted on — for meetings, suggestions, introductions — are at something like a human maximum. SxSW is coincidensity raised to its logical extreme. Like a swarm of mayflies flying in swarms, mating, and with nothing else on their minds. Except SxSW a mini-city of technoids with nothing but connection — and its uses — in mind.

Sure, don’t get me wrong. People are there chasing their personal goals — making deals, showing off software, hawking their newest book, looking for work — but the underlying ground that they are standing on is something from the near future, a combination of more connected urban experience and the mediated social experience of ubiquitous computing: mobile and social.

SxSW has done us all a great benefit, but seeding Austin with a tech salt lick — the conference — that acts as the beacon, rallying some initial core group to come to town each year for the conference. But the outliers who come for the circus and who never go into the tent to see the clowns and the trapeze, those twinkling, shifting hipsters who throng the streets, clubs and lobbies of Austin during SxSW are not just tech faddists: they are visitors from the future, a future with fewer old school PCs in it, and where everyone is rejinkulously connected.

Over 50% of the world’s population is now urban, and that is expected to rise to over 60% by 2030. The cities will not only be bigger, but increasingly dense, so what we learn from SxSW today could shape the social, mobile, urban landscape of the near future, since many of the architects of the future were there, taking notes.

So, again, I was deeply wrong. I’m glad now that circumstances brought me there, and in this different role: outside the conference, out in the messy, powerful flow of the SOMO (social, mobile) world.

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Can Google Go Social?

I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.

To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.

On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.

Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.

So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.

Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

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Not 311: Public Objects

Adam Greenfield, Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism
Beyond Trouble Tickets, Towards Public Objects
No issue-tracking system, even the best-designed and most cleverly devised, is going to quash the frustrations of city life completely. I believe, though, that the system I sketch out here would give cities a supple and relatively low-cost way to close the loop between Jacobian “eyes on the street,” and the agencies that serve and are fully empowered to respond to them. What I’ve described here is, if nothing else, a way to harness the experience and rich local expertise of ordinary citizens.
[Illustration: Jane Kelly]
But what if we took a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.
Then we can begin to treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.
And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there’s no reason to leave this all up to automation. The interface would have to be thoughtfully and carefully designed to account for the inevitable bored teenagers, drunks, and randomly questing fingers of four-year-olds, but what I have in mind is something like, “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter.”
In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I’ve often described as addressability, queryability and even potential scriptability. What does this mean?
- Addressability. In order to bring urban environments fully into the networked fold, we would first need to endow each of the discrete things we’ve defined as public objects with its own unique identifier, or address. It’s an ideal application for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, which I described in Everyware as opening up truly abyssal reaches of address space. Despite the necessity of reserving nigh-endless blocks of potentially valid addresses for housekeeping, IPv6 still offers us a ludicrous freedom in this regard; we could quite literally assign every cobblestone, traffic light and street sign on the planet a few million addresses.
- Queryability. Once you’ve got some method of reliably identifying things and distinguishing them from others, a sensitively-designed API allows us to pull information off of them in a meaningful, structured way, either making use of that information ourselves or passing it on to other systems and services.
We’ve so far confined our discussion to things in the public domain, but by defining open interoperability standards (and mandating the creation of a critical mass of compliant objects), the hope is that people will add resources they own and control to the network, too. This would offer incredibly finely-grained, near-realtime reads on the state of a city and the events unfolding there. Not merely, in other words, to report that this restaurant is open, but which seats at which tables are occupied, and for how long this has been the case; not merely where a private vehicle charging station is, but how long the current waits are.

Moving toward a world of spimes: objects that report on their status based on time (‘refrigerator: it’s four am and all’s well!’), state changes (‘bromeliad in kitchen #2: Water me, please.’), or in response to messages sent by others (‘west elevator: I will come to floor 7 after proceeding to the basement’).

[via spime]

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