South by Southwest: Laboratory for the Future?

I've been attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SxSW) these past few days. It's my first time, and it's a lot to take in.

Everywhere you go, people are nose down in their laptops and phones: while in sessions, while walking down the halls, and while on the panels. Think of the geekiest person in your organization, and multiple them by over a 1,000. That's the average South by Southwest attendee.

Cartoonist Rosscott captures the SxSW vibe.

This leads to some valuable opportunities for product designers, who have often used SxSW to release their wares into this hungry ecosystem of early adopters. In 2007, Twitter was announced here.

The problem is that there are few places on earth like SxSW. Which tools will actually escape the laboratory, become useful, and become relevant to our work? Many of these social tools are useless until there is a critical mass.

The winners are not always easy to spot. When Twitter was announced, many attendees rushed to sign up. But then they wondered (and even doubted) if it would ever catch on. The problem? There was no one to follow except fellow attendees. But 10 billion tweets later, it's now a key communication channel for many organizations.

This year, there is a lot of experimentation with location-based services (LBS), particularly FourSquare and Gowalla. These services ask you to announce your location at public places in exchange for clever virtual badges as well as the occasional real-world rewards. At SxSW, attendees have been checking in at every session and restaurant. One fellow elevator rider joked that he was going to check-in on the elevator.

While they are interesting and fun (more about this in a future post), the question is whether they will enjoy universal uptake. And in what form? People are certainly concerned about sharing their physical location in real time. (Sites like PleaseRobMe.com fan these fears.)

Will these tools persevere in the face of such fears or skepticism? Only a few years ago, many doubted people's willingness to share snippets of their lives. Now, updates on Twitter and Facebook are commonplace. And with FourSquare inking deals with companies like Starbucks, who knows?

The promise of "South by" is that "tomorrow happens here." Yet most people here are spending their time wondering what's next. It's exciting to speculate, and this conference has given me plenty of grist for informed gazing upon the horizon.