Observations from SXSW
The theme this year seemed to be location-aware/real time socialmedia such as twitter (now ubiquitous), brightkite, and the over-hyped foursquare. The picture above was taken at the purevolume ranch where they have screens hung up showing twitter search results of the #purevolume hash tag (see previous post). A big problem with these sites are that they can quickly become cluttered with spam and/or flurries of legitimate updates, thus filtering is key. There are a few ways for users to filter messages: one way of course is to refine the search protocol, another, more effective way, is to follow key personalities. That begs the question: who to follow? Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo) wants you to follow him — so much so in fact, that he offered twitter $125,000/year to be listed in the top 20 suggested list. In addition to the ethics and corporate governance issues (shareholders vs. users), another is how many and which users is the right number to suggest. Kevin Rose of Digg fame (infamy?) announced his new venture at Stubb’s this week, WeFollow (http://www.wefollow.com), which seeks to organize twitter users based on followers by category. Admittedly a helpful service, the site only scratches the surface of search. So long as these sites continue to soar in popularity, they are going to need to focus on filtering to remain relevant.
