Geek Gestalt

At SXSWi this year, Twitter has emerged once again as the technology everyone is using to organize themselves.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--After last year's explosive arrival on the geek scene at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) of Twitter, a lot of people wondered what technology might take the conference by storm this year.

Well, after three-and-a-half days of SXSWi, I'd say we have an uncontested winner.

Announcing the technology that more than anything else has governed how the thousands of attendees here are organizing themselves, finding out what their friends are up to, weighing in on the merits of keynote address interviewers and so much more.

Drum roll please.

It's Twitter. Again.

I have never seen anything like it, not even last year.

Part of that has to do with the fact that even though Twitter dominated at SXSWi 2007, it was still new to many people. This year, it is absolutely ruling this event.

Everywhere you go, people are talking about how they heard about this event, or that unofficial party or this controversy or that rumor on Twitter. People are stopping in their tracks to read Twitter posts on their phones and some of the more talked about happenings here are generating hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Tweets, all in an entirely organic and uncoordinated manner.

Basically, I think a lot of people must be wondering how they managed to get through SXSWi before Twitter came along. It's like trying to imagine the days when there was no email.

In practical terms, Twitter has been terrific, particularly when it comes to the many social events that are wrapped around SXSWi. For example, as my colleague Caroline McCarthy wrote, once people began finding that the lines to get into some of the more popular evening parties were too long, they began using Twitter to find out where new, unofficial gatherings were taking place.

On Sunday, meanwhile, Twitter became a battlefield of sorts as many people used the service to vent their frustrations at Sarah Lacy, the journalist who was interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the day's keynote address.

While discontent was spreading rapidly throughout the packed ballroom where the keynote was being held--and through at least two overflow rooms--about Lacy's interviewing style, those were able to get online were firing away at her on Twitter.

I won't repeat those postings here, but suffice it to say that people were angry and belligerent and were using the service to express themselves.

Afterwards, Lacy herself turned to Twitter to express her own feelings on the matter.

"Seriously screw all you guys," she wrote. "I did my best to ask a range of things."

A day later, even, Twitter is still the best place to find people's evolving thoughts on the Lacy controversy, as many people are posting--including lots who aren't even in Austin for SXSWi--about what happened, about where they can find video of the interview and about their responses to an interview Lacy later gave about what happened.

And while Twitter has been a terrific source of information about what's going on around SXSWi, it is not always accurate.

For example, earlier today, I saw a Twitter post from uber-blogger Robert Scoble in which he said he thought that Zuckerberg would be holding a make-up Q&A session.

I blogged the news--careful, however, to not state categorically that it was true.

That turned out to be a good thing, as, in the end, Scoble had gotten it slightly wrong. In fact, Zuckerberg was taking part in a previously-scheduled Facebook developers' event that was not open to the public and which didn't seem to be a response to what had happened on Sunday.

In part, however, I had been at fault for writing about the potential Q&A session without confirming it and without looking more closely at what others had Twittered after Scoble's original posting.

All of which gave me a lesson that what happens on Twitter doesn't stay on Twitter and that therefore, it's worthwhile to reality-check what you read there.

As SXSWi heads towards its conclusion--there is still a little more than a day left of the event--I have no doubt that Twitter will continue to be the single most influential organizing factor.

But there's also other technologies at play here, as I'm sure some will be quick to point out.

Pownce, for one. Meebo for another.

And, believe it or not, the telephone and even e-mail.

Late last night, as some friends and I were trying to figure out where the crowds were, we found ourselves without the ability to get Twitter feeds.

But we had cell phones and through a painstaking process of calling people, checking email and pure luck, we ended up getting the word that we'd been waiting for.

Still, we all knew that if we'd simply had Twitter, we could have gotten the information a whole lot quicker.

Looking ahead, then, at what might be the Twitter of SXSWi 2009, I'm putting my money on a relatively young technology that not long ago, no one had heard from.

Yes, it's Twitter.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

AUSTIN, Texas--According to Robert Scoble, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to do an open Q-and-A this afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive.

This, of course, would be a follow-up to his Sunday keynote here, which went awry when the audience turned on his interviewer, journalist Sarah Lacy.

I don't have a lot of details, and apparently the open Q-and-A may be going on right now, though Scoble Twittered that he thought it would be at 4:30 p.m. local time.

But for Zuckerberg to make this move would surely go over huge here at SXSWi, where the talk since the keynote Sunday has been about almost nothing but the "train wreck" that was the on-stage discussion.

UPDATE (12:22 PM PDT): Kind of, but not quite. Facebook has planned to hold one of its "Developer Garage" events in conjunction with SXSWi for some time now, and representatives from the company announced on Monday that Zuckerberg would indeed be speaking at the get-together.

It will also, as reported, be at 4:30 PM Central time, but it won't be a massive event. Priority admission, according to Facebook representatives, will be given to those who have already responded to the Developer Garage.

(Editors' note, 1:10 PM PDT: Earlier Monday, Zuckerberg chatted one-on-one with CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy. An account of that conversation is posted here: "Breaking even with Mark Zuckerberg.")

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

Sarah Lacy's reply to those who criticized her for her interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSWi was not entirely graceful.

(Credit: Twitter)

AUSTIN, Texas--If journalist Sarah Lacy got some people riled up with the style of her keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday, her Twitter response to criticism of her will not help calm things down.

As reported here and elsewhere earlier Sunday, Lacy interviewed Zuckerberg as the day's keynote at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and in the process, saw the audience of thousands turn against her for a series of stylistic faux-pas.

I won't rehash all the details here, since you can read up on that in my previous story.

But as pointed out later in the day by Wired News, Lacy followed up the controversy by adding her own thoughts in the form of a Twitter post. (Editors' note: Lacy also spoke on video after the Q&A with Omar L. Gallaga of the Austin American-Statesman.)

The text of her (very public) post? "Seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things."

To me and to many of the people I talked with after the keynote, the problem wasn't Lacy's questions. It was her style. Some have said that it was because she's a woman and attributed a tinge of sexism to the anger directed at her.

I don't buy that for a minute.

What I think happened was that she felt she should be part of the story--by making jokes about her upcoming book, by interrupting Zuckerberg and so on--and absolutely misread the audience. They simply weren't there to see her. They were there to see Zuckerberg. I think the response would have been the same if it had been any interviewer who took the focus away from Zuckerberg.

So for Lacy to respond in a way that indicates she thought that the anger was based on her questions just misses the point.

And it's too bad. I think she could extract herself from this if she understood why people were upset at her, but until she reaches that understanding, she's only going to make it worse by lashing out, especially on Twitter, a forum that is the currency of SXSWi.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

AUSTIN, Texas--Ugh. Talk about losing an audience.

During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address Sunday here at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), on-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion.

The interview between journalist Sarah Lacy and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got ugly quick and then went downhill.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

"Other than rough interviews," an audience member asked Zuckerberg during a short Q&A session at the end of the keynote, "what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?"

"Has this been a rough interview?" Lacy asked Zuckerberg.

"I wasn't asking you, I was asking Mark," the audience member said.

The battle between Lacy and the audience began almost immediately. From the beginning of her interview with Zuckerberg, she repeatedly interrupted him, and all around me, I started to hear annoyed murmurs of people saying that she should stop doing so.

Later on, Zuckerberg himself seemed to get annoyed by Lacy's style. As he was answering one of her questions, she began to talk over him, only to notice his reaction.

"I kind of cut you off," she said. "You kind of had this hurt look, like, 'I was talking.'"

Near me in the third row of the ballroom, someone said, "Is she serious?"

It only got worse from there. At one point, Lacy got confused about how much time was left for the interview, and Zuckerberg teased her.

"Did you run out of questions?" he asked.

The line got a huge cheer from the thousands in the audience.

Burning questions about journals
By now, it became clear to me and everyone around me that the audience was totally on Zuckerberg's side and totally against Lacy. A few minutes later she began to ask him about a series of journals he has kept about Facebook's progress over the years. Zuckerberg clearly felt that she was leading him, and seemed to clam up a little bit.

"You have to ask questions," he said.

Again, his line generated a massive cheer from the crowd.

By now, Lacy was becoming aware of how she was losing the crowd, and said, "Anybody who's seen my (TV) show...has seen me throw a whole glass of water on (Techcrunch founder Michael) Arrington."

With a sly look, Zuckerberg grabbed her water glass and moved it out of her reach.

She then tried to follow up the line of questioning about the journals, saying that one of the interesting things about his process was that he burned the journals when he was done with them.

"I don't do that," Zuckerberg said. "You made that up."

Shocked, Lacy called out to the back of the room where someone who had apparently sat and talked with Lacy and Zuckerberg the night before was sitting in an attempt to get confirmation that he had said he burned his journals.

Someone from the crowd yelled out at the top of his lungs, "Talk about something interesting!"

Again, a monstrous cheer.

At this point, Lacy lost it.

"Try doing what I do for a living," she said. "It's not that easy."

The crowd was not sympathetic, and some demanded that she turn the microphone over to the audience so they could ask questions.

So she responded angrily, "Let's go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule."

And as the audience members began to ask questions, she said, "Someone send me a message afterward about exactly why I sucked so much."

In response, someone yelled out, "What's your e-mail address?"

And someone else shouted, "Check Twitter."

Harsh and immediate criticism
Indeed, a quick glance at some of the Tweets that went out during the interview were devastating to Lacy.

"It sounds like the Zuckerberg keynote was one of the worst things in Internet history," Sean Bonner, the creator of Metroblogging, wrote in a Twitter post.

Added famous video blogger Robert Scoble, "(The) audience in the back of the room is totally ripping her apart. Saying she should just ask questions, not put herself in the interview."

And another Twitter poster wrote, "OK, now this is getting good now that she is getting her (butt) handed to her repeatedly."

As a fellow journalist, I found this all deeply uncomfortable. It is sort of anathema to write a story that is critical of another journalist. But there's no question that from the beginning of the interview, Lacy was injecting herself into the story in a way that was far out of balance with the dynamic that should have been in evidence during a discussion between her and the CEO of one of the most talked-about companies in the world. (Editors' note: Sarah Lacy spoke on video after the Q&A with Omar L. Gallaga of the Austin American-Statesman.)

The reality is, I thought the substance of her interview was pretty strong. She asked a lot of good questions, including some that put Zuckerberg on the spot. He kept asking her how she had learned about certain points she was asking him about.

So in that regard, on paper, her interview would have been a success.

But it was her style that lost her the audience almost from the minute it started. She seemed flirty with him, trying to put on an air of being his buddy, when what the audience wanted was to listen to Zuckerberg talk.

"This interview should have been forty minutes of Q and A," said Janetti Chon, the community and content manager for the Web 2.0 Expo. "Facebook is a phenomenon. The people who are participants in it want to be involved rather than reading it on a blog. I mean, this is the god of Facebook."

To be sure, it didn't occur to Lacy to let the audience ask questions until about 10 minutes before the end of the session, and the crowd clearly didn't appreciate that.

"It definitely seemed like it became a big deal," said Caleb Eubanks, studio directory at VM Foundry, an Austin company. "Instead of focusing on the speaker, we were focusing on the moderator."

This was all very odd.

I had come to the session expecting to do a story on audience reaction to Zuckerberg, since my colleague Caroline McCarthy was writing CNET News.com's main story on the keynote.

Early on, the energy among the crowd was electric. I've been to many Steve Jobs keynote addresses, and I would have to say the crowd for Zuckerberg here was much more on the edge of their seat for him than I've ever seen for Jobs.

And much of that might have to do with his age.

"Age is an influencing factor in encouraging people to come here," blogger Tamar Weinberg told me before the keynote began. "He's 23 or 24, and people are in awe of what he's accomplished at his age."

Then, some high-energy song came on and all around me, people stood up and began to dance raucously. This is not anything I've seen at a keynote before.

The crowd was very high-energy prior to the Zuckerber keynote address. Some audience members were dancing.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

But once Zuckerberg and Lacy began to talk, he became far less of the focus, as Eubanks told me, than the audience wanted.

And in a last ditch attempt afterward to win back her dignity, Lacy tried one last riposte.

"I'm sorry to torture you for an hour," she said.

The line did not go over well.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).