Having been in Austin, Texas for a few days now, I’ve witnessed one of the greatest social gathering of tech-minded people to ever happen, once a year at South by SouthWest Interactive.

The killer app this year is undeniably… the same as last year. It’s Twitter through and through. In the context of a conference where thousands of people are milling around between panels, looking for each other and the Next Big Thing, Twitter is the killer app. It’s assumed and expected amongst all attendees that, just as we have a little heart pumping on the inside of our ribcage, we all have a Twitter username.

However, the observation that I found most interesting is the energy everyone put into communicating what they were hearing. The Zuckerberg keynote got the room buzzing and, in no time, even bloggers who were nowhere near the event were getting the echos of a poorly led interview. In previous years, it would have at least taken a few hours until someone did a write-up of the keynote, but with these social devices and the perfect system to communicate short snippets of information, it was broadcasted as soon as the sentiment arose amongst the crowd.

I’m at risk of pointing out the very obvious here but the Blackberry – probably the most common phone here at SXSW – is mindblowingly business-focussed. Even the font is dry, harsh and doesn’t make the faintest attempt at being visually pleasing. It is a stark, utilitarian device in contrast to the iPhone’s soft, rounded curves and swish user interface – the other baby of the conference. While each device has its pros and cons – attempts at typing while walking on an iPhone very much results in an epic failure – it’s fascinating that this geekfest brings together the two polar opposites, the functional and the creative, in one place as the two most used devices.

What they have in common is that they bring people together socially. From Ballroom A to the depths of Room 19-B, and from Austin to the rest of the world, they make communication easy. Comforting to know that even geeks need to be social too, no?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Events and conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.