The Social

NEW YORK--The line on Wednesday night snaked outside the New York Stock Exchange building as a swarm of marketing, advertising, and other media types waited to get into the party that AOL was throwing on the trading floor to mark its spin-off from Time Warner. Onlookers weren't really sure what the big deal was.

An evening commuter walked past, craning his neck up at the massive AOL-logo banner--yes, the one with the fuzzy blue monster on it--and asking a few of the people in line, "Why's AOL having a party?"

"Spinning off from Time Warner."

"Oh, finally," the commuter replied, and sauntered off into the night.

Approximately 10 minutes later, security stalled a pack of party guests between the coat check and the entrance to the trading floor so that they wouldn't get in the way of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's photo op on the red carpet with publishing industry dame Anna Wintour. There were waitresses carrying massive bourbon-infused cocktails called "The Ticker," sushi chefs chopping up spicy salmon rolls, and a photographer snapping pictures of guests posing with the iconic NYSE gavel. Oh, and there was a DJ booth where rap legend Sean "Diddy" Combs was calling the shots.

The next morning, long after that had all been cleared out, trading of the new AOL stock commenced: it fell in the first hour, hovered around $23 for most of the day, and climbing a few notches to close at $23.52. It looked less like the refreshed, shiny AOL that had turned the NYSE trading floor into a celebration of its vision of 21st-century publishing, and more like the AOL that, in preparation for the spin-off, cut 2,500 employees and began to explore selling off peripheral businesses like ICQ and MapQuest.

"I haven't looked at it because we've been so busy," Armstrong, in a morning call with reporters and analysts, said of the company's stock price. "The stock may go up and down, but I can tell you internally that the company continues to progress and get stronger."

Not very long ago, AOL was a punchline: edgy publishing outlet Thrillist, known for its in-the-know men's newsletter and wacky stunts that often involve party planes, threw a party in the summer of 2008 with a "vintage AOL" theme that interspersed the once-ubiquitous dial-up tone with mid-'90s pop songs (Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, it should be said, happens to be the son of former AOL exec Ken Lerer). AOL was the ultimate brand for the old Internet, the one that would forever be associated with the "You've Got Mail" recording and the e-mail addresses that have long since fallen out of favor.

Its attempted revamp does elicit a few "over the hill" snickers, but in New York's media community--the people flooding the Stock Exchange on Wednesday night--it's treated with a good deal of respect. Armstrong was very well-regarded in his prior gig as a sales executive at Google. At the lavish AOL spin-off party, there were fewer snarky remarks than expected about wasted money, premature celebration, the disastrous results of AOL's original Time Warner merger in 2000, or how many laid-off employees the event had cost.

Because these are the people who, as much as New York media likes to thrive on an aura of cynicism, really do want the new AOL to succeed. The industry's been more or less smashed to bits, with magazines closing up shop and newspapers going through yet another fit of layoff rounds. Regardless of early concerns about its stock price, the new AOL is a bright spot.

Using its 2005 purchase of blog network Weblogs Inc. as a cornerstone and ambitiously rolling out new properties to add to the arsenal, AOL increasingly shifted focus away from its access business and more toward publishing. The company uprooted its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Va., to New York, picking a downtown office space in much closer proximity to the trendy digital agencies and blog networks of SoHo and Cooper Square than to the media industry stalwarts--including then-parent company Time Warner--in midtown.

Shortly before the spin-off, AOL announced a project that Armstrong had been hinting at for some time: Seed.com, a sort of clearinghouse for assigning freelance journalists and photographers to areas that its "engine" has deemed to be high-interest or in need of coverage. The company hired veteran journalist Saul Hansell to helm the project.

"Basically, our system allows us to take lots of data to figure out how to make better content for the Internet," Armstrong said in Thursday's conference call.

Seed.com has garnered some criticism: that it's really no different from existing business models of companies like Demand Media; that it will invariably prioritize tabloid-like, sensationalist stories with huge readership potential rather than less titillating but important journalistic endeavors; or that regardless of how innovative it is, it won't save AOL's advertising revenues.

Armstrong, of course, has a "go forth" attitude toward it all. "We focused the strategy of the company very clearly and succinctly around content, advertising, and communication," he said in Thursday's call. "And as we think about the future and stay focused on what we're going to be executing, we're in a good place because of where the Internet is headed. The '90s were about access, (and) AOL played a major role in access...This decade has really been about platforms: Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and we believe that the next decade will really be about content.

Not everybody agrees. But the invite list for AOL's celebration sure hopes Armstrong has the right idea.

The hottest hotspots in New York...for nerds.

(Credit: Sam Lessin)

Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.

Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this kind of data can reveal. He's posted it on his personal file "drop" on Dropio.

Lessin trawled through the data to find what time people checked into coffee shops in the morning (and whether they were doing this earlier or later on a given day), how much people "lost steam" over the course of a party- and conference-filled week, and how much the most popular gatherings actually matched up to the Internet Week New York official schedule. As it turns out, the hottest parties were impromptu, unofficial gatherings at the Standard Hotel and, um, Sing Sing Karaoke.

Obviously, this isn't perfect. Foursquare updates are voluntary, which means that data can't say a thing about what people are doing when they aren't telling the app about it. The presence of an app like Foursquare, too, can also skew social activity: word about the massive impromptu party at the Standard Hotel bar, for example, spread when the Foursquare check-ins started snowballing.

But when you have enough people participating--which, as of yet, Foursquare does not--the critical mass starts to correct some of those issues. It's a fascinating sneak peek at what sort of value this data could have down the road.

What we can also look forward to: pretty infographics, Orwellian privacy concerns. Eek.

The crowd at one of this week's Internet Week parties.

(Credit: Steven Ekerovich/GuestofaGuest.com)

NEW YORK--Tuesday evening was the first night on the job for at least one of the waitresses at the brand-new Standard Hotel, a Los Angeles import straddling the about-to-open High Line elevated park in Manhattan's downtown Meatpacking District. And it must have been quite the trial by fire when several dozen unexpected patrons showed up for an impromptu Internet Week New York gathering.

That's the thing about Internet Week. It has no centralized location, and events can vary wildly by geography. (It seems like half the panels and conferences are in midtown hotels and the other half are in downtown NYU lecture halls.) So after-parties seem to be where everyone winds up.

This one was the work of The New York Times social media marketer Soraya Darabi and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who invited a few people to the outdoor bar at the Standard. Guests "checked in" to mobile networking site Foursquare, their friends dropped by, and soon the place had snowballed to such an extent that the guests decided to give the bar staff a break and relocate to the notably less highbrow Hogs & Heifers Saloon across the street.

On the bright side, I'm expecting that some of the well-off dot-commers in attendance at the Standard, including billionaire Mark Cuban, probably tipped well.

However haphazard it may seem after-hours--Monday night, for example, featured an installment of the Ignite geek-talks series, a TechSet party at champagne bar Bubble Lounge, and the festival's official kickoff event hosted by YouTube and the New York Observer--Internet Week has an agenda.

"New media and Internet technology are very important to the city of New York, certainly important to the film, television, and advertising world," Katherine Oliver, commissioner of Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, said at a small opening event at the new, Google-powered New York visitors center in midtown. "All of our mediums are converging, and we're exploring ways that we can help these companies."

That's pretty clear at some of the events, like reviews site Yelp's party on Tuesday night, which aimed to showcase and promote local businesses in the Chelsea neighborhood, or the old-meets-new media partnership of YouTube and the Observer for the kickoff party, or Tuesday and Wednesday's convergence-themed Mediabistro Circus conference.

It's less evident, say, at 2 o'clock in the morning at Hogs & Heifers, where one of the primary objectives seemed to be convincing the people who'd flown in from San Francisco to get up and dance on the bar, as is customary in the establishment. (They didn't.)

The impromptu SXSWi party at the Driskill Hotel, one of the many sporadic parties that have been redefining the conference's nightlife scene.

(Credit: Brian Solis, via Flickr)

AUSTIN, Texas--Over a lunch of fajitas at the Iron Cactus restaurant Sunday, one of my friends here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival shrugged and said, "I'm just not into the party scene this year. It's all a little weird."

I had to concur. SXSWi, after all, is known for its wild parties. But two nights in, I've clocked in a total of 20 minutes at them before opting to hang out elsewhere, and I'm not the only one.

There are obviously a ton of people going to this year's bashes--the line at the late-night PureVolume House was ridiculously long on Saturday night, I hear, and the Digg party was packed with fans eager to see Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht do a live taping of the show. But many people I've talked to, especially veteran SXSWi-goers, say they're skipping many of the big, planned soirees.

There are a couple of reasons, I think. First there's the fact that budget cuts have meant that admission to a party no longer guarantees access to an open bar. That's enough to make some people just want to hang out somewhere random where it won't be as crowded.

Then there's the fact that SXSWi has gotten simply huge: last year's long lines led to impromptu offshoot parties, and the heavy influence of Twitter and the half dozen location-based networking tools people are using have meant it's easy to find out where your real friends are. On Saturday night, for example, it seems like everyone wound up at the downtown Driskill Hotel via word of mouth.

It's not just the bar scene. Conference attendees have been shaking up the whole panels-by-day, parties-by-night model with surprise cupcake giveaways, scavenger hunts, games of geek Bingo, and something called "SXSW Star Wars" that I don't quite understand. GirlGamer.com wired an RV with a Rock Band game and has been conducting mobile karaoke excursions. (You might've seen me with some friends on Friday night running up and down 6th St. trying to catch it and get onboard. We succeeded.) Honestly, it's sort of more fun and unpredictable this way.

But who knows? This may all change on Sunday night with Facebook's big annual bash.

This is part three of a four-part series. Here are part one and part two.

Surprise: Despite budget cuts and a general malaise about making a big, bubbly scene when loads of people in the tech industry are out of work or in danger of losing their jobs, there are still a ton of parties at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which starts Friday in Austin, Texas. There will be fewer open bars for sure; nevertheless, rest assured that you'll still be able to find far more nightlife options than you could possibly want. They do refer to it as "spring break for geeks," after all.

You'll probably see a lot of the same people at most of these parties, the majority of which require only an SXSWi conference badge for entry (which means the lines get long). But the parties themselves vary wildly in size and vibe.

Some are off-the-walls wacky, like the "Pasties and Pastries Burlesque Cupcake Cookoff" on Friday night, or off-the-walls wacky for a good cause, like the Bacon-Flavored Benefit for the Children's Music Fund, which asks for a $5 donation at the door. On Monday evening there's something called Nuclear Taco Night. I don't think I'm "in" enough with the SXSWi scene to even start to explain that.

Many of the earlier parties (i.e. the ones that start at 6:30 p.m.) are networking-friendly cocktail hours sponsored by big and medium-size companies like Rackspace, several Microsoft divisions, and Google (well, Google Reader and Blogger). Then, of course, there's the official SXSWi party on Saturday night. Sponsored by Frog Design, it's held every year at the Mexican American Cultural Center, which is thankfully big enough to accommodate attendees but is maddeningly far from the rest of the SXSWi mayhem. With temperatures on Friday and Saturday expected to be unseasonably chilly, this partly outdoors party may be smaller than last year's.

The late-night parties will likely just be total nuthouses. Some of these, like Facebook's second annual "friends.get" party at the sceney Pangaea nightclub on Sunday night or RockYou's St. Patrick's Day bash at the Speakeasy music hall on Tuesday, have a guest-list policy and will be tough to get into. Others, like the annual Bigg Digg Shindigg (hosted by...um, Digg) are more open but will still likely have a line snaking around the block.

Keep tabs on your Twitter feed, too. One unofficial party, called 32bit, isn't even disclosing its location until the last minute via Twitter. And last year, the party that took everybody by surprise happened when a bunch of popular Twitterers let their friends known that seven cases of wine had just been carted to a hotel lobby. Expect the flash-mob model to get repeated this year, probably several times.

P.S.: Here's one you should totally check out: CNET's own Buzz Out Loud podcast is having a mixer at the Cedar Door on Friday at 6:30 p.m., after its live show taping.

If you're looking for something "good" to do Thursday night, you're in luck. Volunteer-organized Twestivals are planned in more than 200 cities around the world.

The Twestivals are a loose coalition of fundraisers that aim to use the social-media tool du jour--Twitter--to raise money for Charity Water, a nonprofit devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing countries.

It's not officially organized by Twitter, but enthusiasts are hoping that the series of Twestivals can be an example for future fundraisers and how the likes of Twitter can fuel volunteer and donor efforts. Word has spread largely through Twitter buzz. And given the current economic situation, many nonprofits are going to need to follow the example of the small-donor-driven Obama campaign in lieu of depending on a few deep pockets.

I should disclose that I've been doing some volunteer work with the New York edition of Twestival, helping write some copy for promotional materials. New York is Charity Water's home city, and the organizers are expecting more than a thousand people at a big nightclub blowout in the West Chelsea neighborhood. Other Twestivals will be smaller and more intimate gatherings, more like the "meetups" (or "tweetups," if you will) that local Twitter communities have been organizing for months now.

All in all, Twestivals around the world hope to raise a whopping $1 million on the night of the event and as a result of subsequent press throughout the rest of February.

The final Media Meshing party on Thursday night.

(Credit: Kate Miltner (flickr.com/photos/loggedhours))

NEW YORK--I hereby insist that we all stop using the "Recession? What recession?" line, which seems to be used every time any company has thrown any moderately lavish party in the last two months. Not only is it overused, but I think folks have caught onto the fact that things have legitimately changed.

Here in New York, the last blowout launch party in the city was for T-Mobile's Android phone in October. Company holiday parties have been scaled back like mad, leaving fewer opportunities for that great New York sport known as party-crashing. But socialization hasn't stopped; it's just changed its tune.

There were a few events of note this week. Note the trend: no more open bars!

The Goods for Good charity event at the downtown City Winery.

(Credit: Goods for Good)

• On Monday night, a relatively new nonprofit called Goods for Good held its annual benefit (read: everyone paid to get in) at a new downtown venue called the City Winery. (It is, in fact, Manhattan's only winery.) Goods for Good's mission is to gather unwanted corporate supplies en masse, from pens and notebooks to conference swag, and donate it to schools in developing countries.

It wasn't a tech event, per se, but there's a reason I'm including it here: The organizers said that they're not really on Silicon Valley's radar, but would like to be. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, we saw the emergence of SchwagginWagon, which encouraged conference attendees to donate the free stuff they got on the show floor and then didn't want. Goods for Good's angle is a little different, since they are interested in bulk supplies that would otherwise be thrown away and that could actually be put to use in a classroom. Check 'em out if you're interested.

• Blip.tv, a video-sharing platform that pulled in another round of financing just in time, threw its holiday party at a low-key downtown bar on Wednesday night. There was no open bar; company executives were surreptitiously handing out drink tokens instead. Within a couple of hours, the place was pretty much a mosh pit--even when the free drinks ran out.

• Prankster-slash-boulevardier Richard Blakeley, by day the video editor at Gawker Media, decided earlier this month to call off his series of monthly "Media Meshing" mixers. There's never been anything lavish about Media Meshing; it's a cash-bar event at a relatively divey bar called Sweet and Vicious. But Blakeley's rationale was that it's a bit gauche to be throwing a series of media parties while people continue to lose their jobs. Gawker itself has gone through rolling layoffs this season, sparing Blakeley but axing many of his cohorts.

So Thursday night was the final Media Meshing, at least for a while. There are persistent rumors that someone else with less recession sensitivity will take the reins. Or not. But in either case, the economic reality has clearly hit the after-hours scene.

"I haven't had a drink all night," one of Blakeley's Gawker colleagues told me, shaking his head. Knowing that such behavior was uncharacteristic, I asked him why. His reply was, "Because nobody's offered to buy me one yet."

For a company that's cutting costs these days, the annual holiday party is an easy target. But there have been fewer cancellations in the tech industry than one might think.

True, eliminating an evening of eggnog and sugar cookies won't help an ailing balance sheet that much; in the current financial downturn, it has a lot to do with appearances, too. "It's the economy, definitely, but it's also a lot of public perception," said Celia Chen, a New York-based event planner who runs the blog Notes on a Party.

"People don't want to seem like they're being gratuitous or over-the-top when their colleagues have lost their jobs. It's more of a responsible way to run your company," she said.

On the other hand, there's a delicate balance between appearing prudent in the face of hard times, and keeping employee morale afloat. Many tech companies are in trouble, but for the most part they are not in meltdown mode like financial services companies or in a continued downward spiral like print media companies. Perhaps because of this, event planners say they haven't seen the same cancel-everything attitude when it comes to tech companies that they've seen in other industries.

"In the financial industry, their budgets are significantly lower than last year. In the tech world it really depends on the company," said Nate Valentine, a partner in the San Francisco events firm Vintage415. "You're seeing companies that are new, emerging companies that are doing events that haven't done events in the past, because they have the budget (now)."

Things are very different in traditional media companies, many of which have acquired tech start-ups and recently expanded their digital divisions--they're hurting, badly. Hearst Publications, which shuttered three magazines, canceled its party. So did Viacom, which is rumored to have layoffs coming before the end of the year. But many smaller media companies and tech start-ups have never had a large-scale holiday party, and probably aren't hiring high-end caterers or renting out big nightclubs for open bars.

The appearances factor comes into play here, too: employees of some smaller companies say they haven't even heard yet about whether the holiday party is on the books or not, indicating that a few executives are still vacillating on how appropriate it would be to throw a company party amid layoffs. "I haven't actually heard either way yet (about a cancellation)," said a representative from one San Francisco-based start-up that recently cut several dozen employees.

"I can't see us not having (a party)," said an employee of one New York-based blog company that also went through a fresh round of layoffs. "It'll suck, but we'll have it, I'm sure."

For larger companies, scaling back a holiday party can be particularly appearances-driven because there's a good chance they've already paid for much of it. "If you're a really big company, you're putting a deposit down on a Christmas party probably in September, if not August, because you have to accommodate a large group and it's been allocated in the budget for the year," Chen said.

There are signs of cost-consciousness everywhere: Valentine said that recently a group of several dozen Google employees in the Bay Area had arranged for an open bar at one of Vintage415's venues without actually booking the club. In New York, news outlet The Daily Beast reported that Google was renting less glitzy venues for its Gotham holiday parties. (Representatives from Google were not immediately available to confirm the report.)

"They'll still find a way to celebrate," Valentine commented. "It's just a different way to celebrate."

Viacom, for example, canceled its companywide party as well as parties for big divisions like MTV Networks and Paramount. "All employees across the country are getting two extra vacation days in exchange," company spokesman Jeremy Zweig told CNET News.

One member of Viacom's MTV Networks said that he speculates individual divisions of companies may come up with their own smaller celebration plans. "I'm sure we'll have drinks somewhere, at some point," said the Viacom employee, "even if it's just my team."

But a bigger complication arises when it comes to companies that have traditionally invited clients, media, or analysts to holiday parties. Canceling a party to which non-employees, particularly non-employees with an indirect stake in the company, are invited, could skew perceptions about that company's health. Both Google and Facebook, for example, have already sent out the invitations to their holiday media parties, fairly low-key affairs at company headquarters where handfuls of bloggers and journalists show up to schmooze with executives.

That said, the image issues work in the other direction, too. Chen said that a new-media company might want to think twice before throwing a big holiday party where one of the goals is to get loyal advertisers nice and tipsy. "Advertisers, I think they want to know that the companies they're advertising in are fiscally responsible," she speculated. "I think advertising is taking a hit in its own light, so I think the general feeling is that we have to be respectful of what's happening with so many people being laid off. And people really admire companies that are trying to do the right thing."

In the end, it's a tough executive decision. Unlike, say, the financial services industry, there really is no clear-cut answer in the tech sector to the question of whether a holiday party should stay on, scale back, or get the ax altogether. But event planners agree: it's never a good idea to throw a party just to act like things are all right.

"It's very difficult to celebrate with your senior executives when you have to look your staff in the face and say, 'We just had to let half of you go,'" Chen said.

Trendy men's newsletter Thrillist has already shown its penchant for giving the middle finger to all things recession-related, whether it be chartering party planes or throwing '90s-dot-com bubble-theme parties (granted, both of those stunts preceded the Wall Street meltdown by a few months). But the New York-based start-up may be savvier than its big-pimpin' image would have you think.

The latest move from the company is a monthly compendium called Thrillist Invites, which is a listing of stuff you can do for free, if you sign up and RSVP. The first Thrillist Invites list will be for its New York subscribers--you have to already be subscribed to the Thrillist New York newsletter to be ushered into Invites--but versions for other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are on the way.

"The concept is that these parties are events that typically, Thrillist readers wouldn't have access to: 100 percent free, open bar, great entertainment," co-founder Ben Lerer told CNET News. The invites will range from restaurant openings and wine tastings to nightclub parties and clothing sample sales.

It's sort of similar to MyOpenBar, a weekly listing of regional establishments that offer free or heavily discounted drinking opportunities, but Lerer said it will have a more exclusive, first-come, first-served focus than the "unlimited Pabst Blue Ribbon" offers that often fill up MyOpenBar's ranks.

Lerer added that launching Thrillist Invites wasn't recession-induced, even though belt-tightening readers may be looking for cheap entertainment, and venues may be looking for people to fill their spaces in a time when they might be booking fewer holiday parties.

"It originally stemmed from the fact that we surveyed our audience earlier this year and asked, 'What do you guys want more of?'" Lerer explained. "Something like 80 (percent) to 90 percent of our audience said they wanted more events coverage."

Earlier this month, Thrillist expanded its Web site to offer more content, putting it further into the niche of "lifestyle publication" rather than "daily newsletter," and Lerer said that with a bigger focus on events, the site may expand further--like into Cobrasnake-ish party photo coverage.

Thrillist will also throw more of its own events, a move that some other food-and-bar culture companies, including the San Francisco-based Yelp, have taken in order to fortify a loyal following and give their users an "insider" status. Plenty of liquor brands advertise on Thrillist already, which Lerer said has made it easy for them to nail down booze sponsors.

And Lerer said Thrillist, which is fully advertising-supported and plans to stay that way, is financially sound. Granted, he didn't start from ground zero: he's the progeny of former AOL executive and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, and fellow ex-AOLer Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm has taken a big stake in the start-up. Another Pilot Group-backed newsletter brand, DailyCandy, sold to Comcast earlier this year for about $125 million.

"Obviously, we get asked this question 50 times a day," Ben Lerer said when asked about a recession strategy. "We are doing really good...even if things slow down in the advertising community, in the online ad space, and even if we're growing less quickly because of some recession."