The snow today is making me really look forward to SXSW Interactive in Austin. 2010 will be my 3rd time attending so I wanted to write up all of the mobile services that I will be leaning on to schedule, network and keep my battery going all week…and I do mean *all* week.

Rules

SXSW is a game. It’s about doing everything you want but not wasting your time planning and confirming, getting everything done, meeting up with everyone you wanted to see. Potentially you won’t remember any of it, but you’ll have lots of new connections and warm feelings for people who are showing up in your stream all year as a result.

Austin is your playground. It’s where all the new mobile services that help us accomplish our SXSW plans.

There are 3 areas which you must master if you are to fully free yourself of your laptop @ SXSWi:

Advance Scheduling: It is imperative to look at the schedules and try to comprehend everything that is going on so you don’t feel the dread of missing out on anything. This plan will fail miserably, but these tools will make the experience better for you and better for those who follow your example.

1) Tungle Tungle lets you schedule with people without a lot of back and forth. It looks at your outlook or ical powered calendar and lets you paint your availability, or even shake to schedule from it’s iPhone app. This is for real meetings with people that you cannot miss.

Here is the tungle demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQ9O4Rycc

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Some], Requires Download [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Fast]

2) Plancast http://plancast.com/toms I’ve been told I use this too much already, but I’ve been very excited about it’s potential for spreading the word about your particular panel or workshop at SXSW. They have useful profiles on there already like Badgeless SXSW which tells you all the events you can attend without a SXSW Badge. BTW @Leahculver please skip the Owen van Natta party and finish up the iPhone app b4 SXSWi, kthxbai.

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Yes], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Slow]

3) My.SXSW iPhone Application This official app loads all of the event schedules at once (which takes a good amt of time the 1st time) and is integrated with the my.sxsw.com schedules and your official SXSW profile, which on the iPhone app is easier to set up than on the desktop. You can upload your photo and add social networks. However, this app is not connected for sharing panel links on social networks or even via email.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Fast]

4) Sched.org http://sxsw2010.sched.org This was the best mobile web calendar last year with full description of panels and great use of JavaScript overlays to minimize page loads, still a bit heavy for AT&T

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Medium]

5) Sitby.us http://sitby.us This may replace Sched.org for me this year. A quick loading mobile website with really easy navigation for the full SXSWi calendar and ability to check-in and share on twitter WHERE YOU ARE SITTING in a particular panel! How’s that for real-time? Really well done.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes], Requires Download [No]

Contingency Planning: Planning The panels, movies, drinkups and music in Austin start out like spores and grow based on community distribution of event details and checkins from attendees. The battlefield of SXSW will look nothing like your pretty calendar. So SXSW has already tested Twitter and Foursquare in this capacity, but there is a new entrant to the fray and it is specifically designed to facilitate conversation at an event without junking up the feeds of people who are not attending, and it’s called HotPotato. All panels at SXSWi 2010 should start by pointing their audiences to the associated HotPotato event.

1) Twitter and Twitter Connect Sites/Apps Status updates and hashtags still rule the day, it will be interesting to see if that changes in 2010. Tweetie 2 is my choice of app, and its seamless ability to manage more than one account is quite helpful when on the go. Sitby.us like many other apps lets you Tweet

Reach [High], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Hashtags], Noise [High]

2) Facebook and Facebook Connect Sites/Apps Facebook events are underlying a lot of the Plancast links and is currently the glue behind HotPotato

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [Low], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Full Service], Noise [High]

3) Foursquare Foursquare has picked up where Twitter left off, as now people find out which party to go to based on the stream of Foursquare check-ins. Badges specifically designed for SXSW were a hit last year, e.g. the Porky badge for checking in at Stubbs. Too crazy for you?... Check-in off the grid like tiger w. be

Reach [Low], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [People Tab], Noise [Medium]

4) HotPotato HotPotato lets you attend, watch or follow events based on your proximity and makes the chatter in each event relevant by 1) defining the event 2) offering more than just commenting e.g. posting photos and links for making references and analogies to the event 3) giving you a view to whom within your network (currently powered by Facebook Connect) is commenting on what events 4) tuning your feed based on location

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [Full Service], Noise [Low]

Battery Life!

What I will bring to stay connected 24/7 from Thurs-Wed.




1) Just Mobile | Gum Pro: this little power grenade from Just Mobile is supposed to carry 2-5x iPhone charges and power up fast, 90% in an hour, and it uses both a 5-pin camera cord power up and and the iPhone cord to charge the iPhone, with a switch to turn off the juice if it is not being used.

How people will make fun of you: “Why do you have an iPhone cord coming out of your pocket? Are you plugged in right now?”

2) Griffin Tune Juice: the un-green little AAA battery pack that takes 4 batteries and charges without requiring a wall socket. Which means you don’t have to stand under the stage at Stubbs or hit on hostesses to have them charge your phone if you forgot to charge your extra battery pack.

How people will make fun of you: “batteries? srsly?”

3) Kensington Mini: This bottom feeder is good for a small charge at the end of the day, light, small, no extra cords while carrying. Charges with a 5-pin camera cord into USB. The fact that it plugs into the bottom could be a problem if you put it in your front pocket and sit down. L

How people will make fun of you: “gee you have a really long phone.”

4) The Mophie Pack: Mophie gets a colbertian wag of the finger. Once my battery pack of choice, until the weird jack that plugs in a weird non 5-pin cord broken into the device and has rendered the Mophie pack useless.

How people will make fun of you: “is that really an iPhone, it looks so big and bulky.”

It will be a showdown for sure, but at least I’ll be prepared.

What I’ll be doing:

http://plancast.com/a/if1 Moderating UX of Mobile Panel, Friday March 12th @ 11am with Kyle Outlaw (Razorfish), Scott Jenson (Google) and Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

http://plancast.com/a/if3 Organizing the Mobile Advertising Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 3:30pm with Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Justin Siegel (MocoSpace)

http://plancast.com/a/11r0 Organizing HTML5 vs. Flash Discussion, Monday March 15th @ 11:00am with Richard Ting (R/GA)

http://plancast.com/a/if4 Organizing the Mobile Social Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 2:00pm with Michael Sharon (Facebook) and Justin Shaffer (HotPotato)

http://plancast.com/a/if5 Organizing the Mobile Commerce Workshop, Tuesday March 16th @ 5:00pm with Francesco Rovetta (PayPal)

Is anyone writing up a guide for Android?

Ping me @ SXSWi on your service of choice.

foursquare

tungle

plancast

twitter
 

Last week Facebook shared its plans for their iPhone application redesign, which were more impressive for mobile than they were on the desktop when new.facebook.com was launched on July 28th. Facebook has been the social networking leader in desktop and mobile convergence, and they are leveraging their native application to finally close the desktop/mobile feature gap, which should make Apple happy. What's exciting about this redesign is that next month, Facebook will finally offer access to Posted Items – plus notes and other news-feed items on mobile. Hopefully their iPhone mobile web app will follow suit as part of the redesign, but since Facebook is a social networking utility rather than a publisher, if Facebook's iPhone web-app drags behind the native application, publishers can pick up the slack. Publishers can benefit simply from the fact that viewers on Facebook mobile can now see posted web links that will come with the launch of the Facebook iPhone application 2.0. For news articles that have a particular relevance within a friend community, friends, not brands or companies, drive traffic to web news links. Facebook users’ comments are now threaded to the particular object that they comment on – if a friend of yours posts a news article and someone comments on it, it shows up in your newsfeed with all associated comments.

Why will there be growth in conversation based on Facebook's redesign? Social networkers are quite comfortable commenting on photos that they or their friends have uploaded. Facebook and Flickr share ownership of a large portion of web photo comment streams, and if we agree with David Brooks in his “Lord of the Memes” opinion piece “ Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)” then Facebook is a key place for discussion to evolve as it is still seen as cool, maybe not as cool as Twitter, but the coolest big player in the market.

As posted items go mobile that means that similar to photo commenting, when you find something for example on The Washington Post iPhone-optimized site about the 2008 election you can use the Save/Share feature to post to Facebook and offer a comment with your own spin and start your own comment stream amongst friends on the desktop and when they fire up Facebook mobile on their iPhone. Introducing…Mini-Meme. For those of you who've been commenting on photos you and your friends have uploaded and writing on the walls of fan pages created by brands, the next behavior that will become a wild source of web-edification, particularly during the election season, is commenting on posted items ( I know you're excited just stay with me ). Some people call this activity Re-Blogging but I think that name makes the activity sound as interesting as re-insurance. If you are the first to share the web link in your network and your friends comment, then congratulations, you have officially posted your own Mini-Meme. I'm defining a Mini-Meme as a web comment stream that originates separate from the content source. Of course there will not be as many comments in your web circle as on the primary news sources, but this circle of friends will drive new web traffic back to those news sources. The difference is, users will comment on Facebook, not the primary news source so their friends can see their reactions. Increasingly, as this more advanced feature becomes popular, small, decentralized opt-in lists of news discussions will emerge within interest-based friend groups, and re-emerge periodically as related items surface.

Why do I think this newer form of conversation will get bigger on Facebook? Because we've seen this behavior happen naturally on Twitter and FriendFeed already. Will it be more conversational than Twitter? Probably not, Twitter friends are more likely followers based on interests rather than proximity or friendship. But the scale effect of Facebook becoming more conversational is a big net positive for conversation on the net.

Comments on NYTimes, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, or Techcrunch articles can reach 1,000 within hours of their timestamp. To participate in these rip-tide comment streams requires that you post comments almost immediately for them to be seen at all. Also you're staking your reputation by commenting on a news site and subjecting yourself to direct blogger attacks that will live in SEO for infinity. Why not just comment at your leisure within your own friend group and hear back from those you’ve already developed a thick skin for…your friends. To make sure that people can share what they find interesting, mobile websites should have sharing features so you can post links (see example from The Washington Post below). Sharing support is crucial for the iPhone especially since there is not, to date, a native Apple copy-and-paste solution. The publishers have a role in the distribution of Mini-Memes - enabling users to post items to Facebook and other social networks and bookmarking sites. Even if copy and paste makes it to the iPhone, it is good practice to give users easy sharing choices, and even nudge them with icons of the social networks on which you'd like them to share. On the desktop this is standard fare, for example, Read Write Web goes as far as to use Moopz to integrate comments so that they can appear on both friendfeed and the original blog post. For those publishers that do not offer easy sharing options users will just send iPhone screenshots via email to social networks and you won't get the linkback traffic from the Mini-Meme.

Without the momentum of mobile posted items go un-noticed for days, but people who access the native Facebook iPhone application will see things more quickly. So whether someone is posting about the FailWhale or about Obama’s VP choice, the relevancy to you and your network just went up by adding an a mobile interface for easy access more of the day.

friendfeed, figured out that photos were not the only thing people would comment on in a news feed. In fact a news item is a safer bet and much more likely to attract a wider set of commenters. Friendfeed tries to widen the conversation by sneaking in ‘friend of so-and-so’ posts into your news-feed to keep the growth engine of their site going. Facebook, however, already has scale, so they only had to turn on threaded comments to news-feed items and, all of the sudden with the launch of new.facebook.com, on came the lights and you started to see lots of new faces from your friends' networks. Commenting on Posted Items also offers a potential sociological shift, where political organizing can move beyond mere notes related to event logistics or proclamations on fan page walls. Now they can have a conversation. Imagine if a local organizer for Barack Obama or John McCain actually put posts such as "Who can and can't dance in Denver" that they thought were more human interest oriented. The organizer could then add the comment "Aren't we getting a bit too uptight about the rules at these events?" which keeps potential voters engaged during campaign milestones that they cannot attend.

There is the primary source of news, like the NYTimes, which only the courageous, expert or insane post comments to, and then there is the Mini-Meme on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and elsewhere for the person who posts a link of a NYTimes article in their news feed. The Mini-Meme gives Facebook a new dimension to what we know of as passing notes in class, or talking at the water cooler, or whatever convention you use to discuss things like this week’s DNC.

For me Twitter is the best source of daily news, friendfeed is the news magazine of the web, and now Facebook this September will be the portal/deck for the friended masses that combines both the daily news and the weekend news magazine with seamless integration into desktop and mobile.