I just stumbled across this link through the halls of Twitter this morning; the link is a wiki where someone who will be attending SXSW in a couple of months can post their twitter account.

I could be totally off my rocker, but this seems totally silly since last year, nearly EVERYONE was on Twitter already and that was before twitter exploded into an international phenomenon. Now, a year later. The small percentage of people who fell behind last year will likely be caught up, and the ones that aren’t will figure it out pretty fast when everyone is walking through the halls of the Austin convention center, looking down at their iPhones, muttering “f*%&ing twitter!”.

Which brings me to my next series of thoughts:

First, is twitter ready to handle the onslaught of this year’s SXSW twitteratti? I have seen all kinds of speculated numbers of growth, and talked to Alex Payne a couple of times in the last year about the hardware that’s powering twitter and it’s various interfaces (jabber, SMS, etc) and several months ago it was an absurdly powerful cluster of hardware. In order to handle SXSW08, they’re going to need some sort of miracle server.

My second thought is more about us, as users. Last year Twitter ruined the battery in my Treo650 and prompted the purchase of a blackberry. This was, of course, before the advent of m.twitter.com. Another thing to remember was that I was mostly adding new people throughout the conference and checking in on them. I didn’t have a ton of followers or people I was following.

This year…I’m a) on an iPhone that doesn’t have a changeable battery and b) following a few hundred people before I even touch down in Austin. Sounds like trouble to me.

Is Twitter going to be nearly as effective this year as last, or will it become too chatty and therefore, ineffective for conference-going uses?

A couple of ideas to resolve the issue:

1) Twitter does a proper implementation of groups, complete with shorthand.

While I realize this isn’t likely, it’s also not impossible and they have been talking about it since LAST year in Austin. Groups would let me message only the appropriate group of people, or the people that care. This would also leave the people who couldn’t come to the conference out of the line of fire when twitter gets really rowdy at the nighttime social events. :-)

2) Hashtag adoption

A close second to the groups implementation, a follow hashtag/track hashtag feature would help. Since I’m not using twitter over SMS, track doesn’t help me in the least. I really wish it did, because I’d love to use it. Hey guys, make track work on my personal timeline, not just via SMS.

If I was to include the hashtag “#SXSW” and other relevant variants (”#OpenIDMeetup”, “#WordPressMeetup”, “#BarCampAustin”, etc), in tweets (which would be annoying, but doable), it could resolve some of the firehose. It’s still a hack, and has lots of holes and opportunities for missed messages, but hey…Twitter drops messages all the time so we really should be used to that by now.

3) Extra Phone/Twitter Device

If Twitter sold a Twitter-enabled device, I’d not only buy it but I’d probably pay a service fee. Sure, most of the time, I use my phone but in heavy-use cases (read: conferences) I’d be willing to carry something else to make sure that Twitter wasn’t killing my cell phone’s battery, and that I got optimum performance out of twitter.

Something like the Amazon Kindle, without the shitty design, but with the built in EVDO device so I didn’t need to be at a WIFI hotspot. Like I said, I’d pay for the service. Maybe not EVERY month, but I’d pay for a week-long pass during conference periods, and I’d probably pay upwards of $30-50 for that week-long pass - IF the battery life didn’t suck and if the message delivery was stable.

Since there PROBABLY won’t be a Twitter-handheld in the next 60 days, I may resolve to getting a cheap-o 2nd line on my ATT plan, with very low minutes but unlimited text messaging. I’d get a phone that was not only small, but had a changeable battery. It doesn’t even need to have a WAP browser, I can use my iPhone for that. This phone will be for TWITTER ONLY!

I really hope that Twitter usage is still viable for SXSW because it really enhanced the conference experience for me last year. Do you have any grand plans for how to make Twitter work for you this year?

Sometime in the next couple of months I need to do a re-vamp and re-post of my “How to Survive SXSW” post, since I’ve learned more about conference going in the last year.

Tags: twitter, SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW08, mobile devices, hashtags, battery, group interactions

In a comment responding to my previous post, Lachlan Hardy asked me what continuing value Facebook had to me.

First, and most simply, none of the blunders they’ve made have directly affected me: none of the privacy violations invaded my personal privacy since I do my best not to have anything to hide, anyway. The closest thing to an invasive blunder Facebook has ever made to me, personally, was the inclusion of SuperPoke, Funwall, and that confounded Zombie application without including an “ignore forever and ever and ever” button.

I think during the initial wave of Facebook account deletions due to, Tara Hunt said something along the lines of “Facebook has made some lousy decisions, but they totally have me by the social graph”. Now, I’m paraphrasing (I wish I could find the original tweet, this was the closest I could find). But Tara’s and my shared sentiment about why we are still on Facebook is similar to why, for instance, I have an account on Pownce and Twitter but spend ALL of my time on Twitter: it’s where my peeps are at.

I can do the same thing and more elsewhere, but my stuff and more importantly, a great deal of my friends, are there.

Remember, I’m from a generation where I was on Facebook before it was open to non students. Remember, the majority of my friends outside of the social media/new media space are either recently graduated or still finishing school. Unlike most of the users of Facebook, who are more of a layer of very rich sod sitting just on top of the surface, I’ve got deep and twisty roots buried into photos, contacts, comments, connections, messages. And many of them are personal, not the casual “nice blog post” or “I think Scoble is a douchebag, too, who needs 8000 friends?” type exchanges that happen for many others.

Roots via Wikimeda Commons - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Roots_by_cesarpb.jpg

Now…I’m not interested in tangent-ing down the road of, “well, if the data was portable like it should be…”. Because it’s not portable. That’s Facebook’s M.O. and I accept that. We’ve got plenty of other opportunities to make it better. Then, Facebook can play catch up (or not).

So really, the value of ANY social network, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ZipKarma, my blogroll, or any other NETWORK OF SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, the value is in those connections, not the tools that the network provides.

In the case of right here right now, the majority of the people that I care about can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Maybe this is why I chuckle every time someone tries to identify value in social media. I think value is the wrong word.

Value, to me, suggests that it must be for sale because something is only “worth” a certain amount if someone else is willing to pay for it.

I learned that lesson as a kid collecting comic books. It was during a collector “bubble”, and me and my friends were excited to have gotten our hands on comics that were “worth” hundreds of dollars. The reason this bubble was a bubble, though, was that much like many valuations they are arbitrary until someone is willing to shell out. People invested big bucks into comics, and since not many people were on the high end of the buying scale, the whole thing fell in on itself. Comics are still very popular, but people collect them for the enjoyment of them, not necessarily to own a “valuable” collection.

There will never be “value” to a social graph because a social graph’s “value” is highest to it’s creator. And even then, my friends aren’t for sale.

I don’t value Facebook. I don’t value Twitter. I don’t value LinkedIn or even my Blogroll. I appreciate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all of the individual connections, nay, the individual PEOPLE that make up the social graph. In the case of Twitter, I totally heart twitter because of the WAY that it’s let me connect.

But Heart != value.

Heart = Appreciation++

Now that I’ve identified a new term to replace the overused and diluted term “value” with something more relevant in this context…on to the next task. Getting rid of “social graph” and “join the conversation”.