The Social

AUSTIN, Texas--With panels and discussions every year about social engineering, hacking, remixing, and culture jamming, South by Southwest Interactive is the must-attend conference for geeks who want to shake things up.

Maybe that's why the many panels at the conference about the future of media--from print to broadcast to music to film--were tinged with the message that fast, often radical change is necessary. With panel topics like "How Copyright Law Failed The Digital Age," "New Think for Old Publishers," and "Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter," this year's SXSWi promised to offer a blunt take on some longstanding stalwarts of the media industry that now lie in states ranging from evolutionary flux to full-out crisis mode. The Austin Convention Center was buzzing with talk of the future, but there was no denying the upheaval going on outside.

The short version of the long version we all know: Traditional moneymaking strategies across the media landscape are losing steam. While solutions from interactive ads to subscriptions to micropayments to social-network "app-vertising" to all sorts of digital sales models have been pitched and put into effect in this new world of iPods and Kindles and YouTube and a dozen different streaming media services, the digital revenues aren't keeping pace with what's being lost. A nasty recession just throws a big, costly fork into the equation.

"I should set up, like, a little picture of me (on my Web site) with a picture of a pirate eye patch on, saying 'Arrrr, give me five dollars!'" said documentarian Morgan Spurlock in a panel called "The Future of the DVD and Digital Distribution," when the topic shifted to the long-shot possibility of asking for donations to combat piracy.

He was joking, obviously. But SXSWi panelists as a whole seemed to indicate that struggling media companies shouldn't just embrace the cutting edge, they should more or less dive off it headlong.

"There is no low-risk solution to innovation. When times are tough, brands and agencies and everyone has a tendency to say, 'Well I don't want to experiment,'" said Patrick Moorhead, director of emerging media at the Microsoft-owned ad firm Razorfish, in a panel discussion on Saturday morning about innovation during a recession. "Our belief is that if you stick with what you've got, that's a bigger risk than taking a risk on emerging media and testing something new that could potentially teach you something."

Moorhead showed off "NewsBreaker Live," an ad campaign created for MSNBC in which motion sensors in participating movie theaters let the audience play a full-body version of a "Pong"-like game to capture real news headlines. It certainly livened up the panel, even though no one could really see closely enough to read the actual headlines.

"South by Southwest, from what I can tell, it's very much end-filtered," said Eric Feng, chief technology officer at Hulu, the joint video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal. "I think it really prides itself on a free spirit, and you're going to get honest feedback from real people, real users, real companies, a lot more so than some of the other conferences you might go to."

So you'd think that this is the sort of place where the old media's struggling elite might show up in search of a few answers, however out of left field they might be.

But they're hard to find. Wander the halls of the Austin Convention Center during SXSWi, and you'll run into loads of start-up entrepreneurs, digital marketers, and representatives from both traditional and outside-the-box advertising agencies. Traditional media companies on both the print and broadcast fronts, however, are tougher to track down. It's unclear as to just how much of a presence the likes of a major broadcast player or a national newspaper has at SXSWi--it's easy to get lost in the hordes of developers and designers.

"I assume they're here," said Avner Ronen, CEO of the video software start-up Boxee, which has made waves recently for offering a well-received product and getting into a sort of content feud with Hulu and its video partners. "I haven't run into them."

Kevin Marks, a Google product manager who has been working on its Friend Connect product and marketing it to some traditional media properties, thought differently. He pointed to panels like "Designing the Future of the New York Times," in which designers from the struggling newspaper talked about their attempts to propel it into the digital world. "I was very impressed with the (traditional) news people here who say, 'We have this problem and we're finding ways to work through it. We're going to work with the Web,'" Marks said in an interview.

On the other hand, there are dangers in listening too closely to the digerati. SXSWi attracts a self-selecting crowd of well-educated futurists who live primarily in major cities or academic hubs, a good number of whom are probably quite confident that the digital revolution is in full force just about everywhere. It's a truism best personified by the fact that the concentration of Apple's iPhone, the quintessential gadget of the tech-savvy and hyperconnected, was so high in Austin during SXSWi that carrier AT&T had to boost its infrastructure for the week. Attendees are invariably in the company of very bright people on the bleeding edge of digital media. But this can be a myopic bunch.

Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of entertainment brand CollegeHumor, pointed out in a Saturday panel called "Comedy on Television and the Web" that even though canceling cable subscriptions and even ditching TVs altogether is trendy among young people in cities like New York and San Francisco, a recent study showed that the trend nationwide is very different. A start-up like Boxee or even Hulu doesn't have the "wow" factor in a suburban household that watches "Dancing With The Stars" on TV in the evenings as it does in a city apartment where the broadcast airing of "The Office" conflicts with happy hour. "The average American watches 151 hours of television per month," Van Veen said, citing Nielsen statistics from last month. "That's an all-time high."

In an interview with CNET News on Monday, Hulu's Eric Feng concurred. "For the Super Bowl you had a hundred million people tune into one event. You still can't amass that type of audience in an online environment."

But however edgy some of the thinking may be at SXSWi, and however much its demographic may deviate from the U.S. population as a whole, the revenue crisis is real, and this is one of the places where it takes center stage. According to Avner Ronen, the sense of uncertainty over profits is what's holding back some of the innovation that SXSWi's masses are so eager to set in motion.

"That's what's scary for the media companies dealing with Boxee," he said. "They saw what happened with newspapers. It's unlike the record industry, it's not like they fought it. They endorsed it, they executed very well against it, it's just...the analog dollars to digital pennies thing."

Right now, many of them are at the point where they could use some insight--even the wacky kind with eye patches.

AUSTIN, Texas--There's Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, FourSquare, Rummble, uLocate, Google Latitude, Yahoo Fire Eagle, and goodness knows which other ones we haven't heard of yet. The location-based mobile networking space has been front and center at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival as hundreds of tech enthusiasts from around the country have been eager to find their friends and learn what's happening.

Perhaps it's fitting that in one of the festival's last panels on Tuesday afternoon, a handful of executives and high-level developers from the location-awareness space got together for a discussion called "Using GPS and Location to Enhance Social Networking." The big question: Do all these disparate services have to get interoperable?

Moderator Tom Marchioro, the location-based services architect at GPS navigation company Garmin, brought up an analogy to text messaging and Web-based IM, two early social-media technolgoies that took very different routes.

After years of carrier restriction, text messages "came up with a standard, and last year there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent worldwide, and it's a total cash cow," Marchioro said. "Internet messaging, 10 to 15 years after it was invented...is a bunch of independent networks and there's no monetization model. So that would argue that if we're going to have a bunch of location-based social networks, they might want to interoperate."

One panelist, Bryan Jones of Mobile Blast, brought up the OSLO Accord, a project raised at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which hopes to bring an OpenID-like standard to location sharing.

Not all the panelists seemed to be on board.

"We would love to be able to work with the other social networks out there, (but) some of the challenge with that is that your social graphs tend to be very different across different social networks," said Martin May, founder of Brightkite.

John Adams, from Twitter's operations team and who hinted that the microblogging service "hopes to have more services that are location-based in the future," said that it could be technically difficult as well. "Different services have different methods for identifying, storing, and locating different privacy data," he said. "With Brightkite, they have a much higher level of granularity around your location data...and it's very different to translate that between both systems."

There's really not a clear answer. And the entrance of two huge tech players into the space--Google's Latitude and Yahoo's Fire Eagle--has given location-based networking some validation. It's also possible that one of them will be the company to come up with the standard that will help level the playing field and allow different services to coexist much like cell carriers in the text-messaging space. Or, perhaps location-based networking will better mirror microblogging: a few years ago, there were several competing services like Pownce and Jaiku in addition to Twitter that are now either defunct or effectively afterthoughts.

One more thing on a slightly unrelated note: Adams did touch upon the "How is Twitter going to make money?" question. "We are looking at commercial accounts. We see a lot of potential in adding that service that (lets) you know you're talking to Shaq or that you know you're talking to a certain celebrity, and to weed out impersonation," he said, "without imposing fees on existing free services."

Breaking: Twitter to start selling "I'm Famous For Real" badges! Money problem solved!

Here's to FourSquare! Former Dodgeball loyalists gather poolside at SXSWi to celebrate the new app.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a cowboy hat, Texas-flag swim trunks, and his trademark hipster glasses--raised a drink and said, "Here's to FourSquare!"

I'm biased. We all were. The iPhone-centric FourSquare has been a project near and dear to our hearts in the New York tech scene, as many of us were loyal users of Dodgeball, the service that Crowley built as a graduate-school thesis and sold to Google in 2005. In January, Google announced that it would be shutting the service down amid budget cuts, and Crowley (along with co-developer Naveen Selvadurai) got cranking on its successor so that they could debut it in time for SXSWi. I was an alpha tester, as were most of those at the impromptu pool party.

If the number of FourSquare friend requests in my in-box are any indication, it's been a hit this week. While it hasn't been as buzzworthy as the then-new Twitter was at SXSWi '07, it's undoubtedly one of the things that people will be talking about when they return home from Austin later this week. And if it goes as Crowley and Selvadurai hope, they'll keep using it, too.

Like Dodgeball (and other location-based mobile applications like Whrrl, Brightkite, and Loopt), FourSquare lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare uses GPS on the iPhone (an SMS code and a mobile Web site is available for other devices, but apps for Android, BlackBerry and the like are down the pipeline) and lets users rack up points and badges for awarding nightlife habits and accomplishments.

"Naveen and I had been kicking around these ideas for a while, since last summer, and then nothing was seriously built until, I guess, that night that we were all at Lock's (that'd be Curbed founder and prolific Dodgeball user Lockhart Steele) birthday party and the rumor started spreading that Dodgeball was getting shut down," Crowley said. "We started to talk (about how) we've really got to build this thing because it's going to be turned off."

FourSquare was built in a matter of weeks, because Crowley and Selvadurai wanted to be able to roll it out in time for SXSWi. "It is, admittedly a little bit sloppy, and it's buggy, and people call us out and say we launched too soon," Crowley said of the occasional slip-ups and outages for FourSquare, which went live in the iTunes App Store less than 24 hours before SXSWi kicked off.. "The goal was to launch here and have people take it back to wherever they live."

Now, they're literally building the application in the SXSWi petri dish, a massive gathering of digital-media's early adopters and innovators who are all eager to socialize and navigate the labyrinthine Austin party scene. Special "badges" have been created for SXSWi. On Monday morning, I earned my "Panel Nerd" badge for spending what FourSquare deems to be too much time at the Austin Convention Center. (Message to my editors: Take note of this!)

He said that while user interest has been through the roof, investors--FourSquare is currently self-funded and run out of Crowley's apartment as well as a number of East Village coffee shops--have been quieter. "I haven't really seen any investors here, to be honest," he said. I've been getting e-mails from a few people, but I haven't run into anyone in the halls or anything." He'll probably need that if FourSquare gets much bigger just to keep its servers afloat. But with penny-pinching the inevitable VC habit du jour, it could take some work.

Crowley also laughed off a Gawker report that Google's lawyers were about to start breathing down his neck over the similarities between Dodgeball and FourSquare--even though Google has launched its own location-aware platform, Latitude.

When Crowley and Selvadurai return to New York later this week, they'll have a lot to do. FourSquare users at SXSWi have been blunt, sending out Twitter messages pointing out bugs and asking when there will be better features to find their friends, like an address-book import function. They'll have to figure out some way to control users attempting to game the system, something that Crowley says has already popped up, and work on building a FourSquare presence in other cities. Right now there are 12, including Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Plus, location-based mobile networking is a hot space. Competitors like Brightkite and Whrrl are better-established, bolstered by investor money, and have already worked in features like Facebook Connect integration. Crowley and Selvadurai have some catching up to do.

They'll also have to deal with what happens when they use FourSquare to "check in" to downtown pizzerias and I show up to steal their food. Just sayin'.

Guess what isn't super-sized? Digital distribution revenues for filmmakers, apparently.

AUSTIN, Texas--The Internet and the rise of online video have meant a plethora of new options for independent filmmakers. But, as has been well-publicized, the money just isn't there yet. A panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday highlighted that this is an extremely contentious issue.

"Digital distribution is not some magic bullet," said panelist Gary Hustwit on the success of his documentary "Helvetica," in front of a packed room of audience members that came from both SXSWi and its sister festival, SXSW Film. "It's not that because the film is available digitally it does well. It's because you do the work...because of that exposure, it did well."

In spite of widespread blog speculation that DVDs are dying and that digital downloads and streams will replace the physical medium in due time, filmmakers say that from the creative side, relying on these outlets--iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Joost, and SnagFilms, represented on the panel by CEO Rick Allen--simply is not profitable yet. In fact, in many cases, sales and revenue numbers are kept on the down-low.

Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian behind "Super Size Me" and "Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?," put it bluntly. "The reason numbers aren't released (for digital distribution revenues) is because the numbers are pathetic," he said. "The numbers are sadly low in comparison to what we expect from film and television."

"If you're looking to pay your rent, not so much, if you're looking to pay your phone bill, you have a great chance," Spurlock continued. "It's getting to a point where it's down the road from being profitable, but we're just not at that point yet."

The panelists disagreed over whether the best digital distribution strategy is to get a film on as many platforms as possible or to be strategic in the hopes of making more money.

Matt Dentler of digital representation group Cinetic Rights Management argued for the be-everywhere model. "We are a direct aggregator to, I would say, about a dozen portals in the U.S., and we just closed our first couple of deals in Europe." Dentler said that Cinetic's films go to YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, SnagFilms, and quite a few others. "We're probably going to have about five to ten more in Europe over the next few months...what this touches on is there are so many freaking options out there for consumers that you kind of have to provide all of them."

But Steve Savage, president of distributor New Video, disagreed. "It's good to be agnostic, and I think it's a good way to put everything out there and see what sticks but there's also other ways to do it," he asserted, "to be really strategic, to find where the money is."

The panelists seemed to agree that, as so many people have said before, digital revenues are on the way. "The money you're going to make as an independent filmmaker right now," Dentler said, "the fact that we can start cutting checks for people today, it might not be huge checks, but at least they're checks."

"They don't approach TV license fees," SnagFilms' Allen said. "We are at the front end of this. However, they are hundredfold, a thousandfold, the size of the checks that most independent documentarians have received from theatrical release."

Gary Hustwit said that filmmakers need to take responsibility for pushing the digital distribution business forward themselves. "Go directly to the audience instead of relying on, with all due respect to the distributors here, other businesses to do it," he suggested. "Why are we building other people's businesses when we could build our own businesses?"

Kevin Rose, flesh-and-blood iPhone rumor factory

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

AUSTIN, Texas--So the real star of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival has been Apple's iPhone. For better or for worse.

Facebook's big announcement at the annual geekstravaganza, for example, was that its Facebook Connect log-in product would be coming to the iPhone. Most of the products debuting in conjunction with the festival, including location-based mobile apps like Whrrl and FourSquare, are partially or entirely iPhone-centric. And if you happen to be a poor, unfortunate BlackBerry or Treo user, you may get some disapproving looks when you whip your handset out of your pocket around some judgmental SXSWi-goers.

It's not particularly surprising. This is, after all, the first SXSWi since the debut of the iPhone 3G. While the original iPhone was an instant hit, plenty of people in the tech industry (myself included) held out for the second generation because the first didn't have 3G data access or GPS capabilities. Not to mention there's now the App Store, which has meant the iPhone is a huge priority for developers and designers everywhere.

But on the flip side, there has been such a saturation of iPhones at SXSWi that the network for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for iPhones, promptly floundered (or, to use the geek slang of choice, "fail-whaled"), with conference-goers encountering poor service, weak Internet connections, and dropped calls left and right. iPhone problems were so prevalent that AT&T upped its coverage in Austin for the duration of the festival.

"To accommodate unprecedented demand for mobile data and voice applications at SXSW, we are actively working this afternoon to add capacity to our cell sites serving downtown Austin," a statement from the telecom giant read. "These efforts are ongoing, but we anticipate that customers should see improved network performance this evening and for the remainder of the event. We will continue to monitor network performance throughout the event, and will do everything possible to maximize network performance throughout."

Ouch.

The iPhone's ubiquity at SXSWi is especially fitting because on Tuesday, the final day of SXSWi, Apple itself will be making some kind of iPhone software unveiling.

The Apple announcement, in the company's hometown of Cupertino, Calif., will be far, far away from the bars and barbecues of Austin. But word travels fast here, and speculation has already reached a fever pitch. On Saturday night, during a live taping of his Diggnation podcast, Digg founder Kevin Rose said he anticipates copy-paste functions to come to the iPhone for the first time, and the geek press went wild.

Granted, Rose typically tapes Diggnation with a healthy amount of beer in his system, and he likely wanted to drop a couple of zingers to satisfy the hundreds of excited fanboys who were surrounding the stage with cameras in hand.

But it's about time for copy-paste. And I already feel bad for any SXSWi panelists and speakers who happen to be presenting at that time. As soon as word gets out about Apple's announcement, they'll probably lose the attention of their audiences altogether.

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.

The Onion's Baratunde Thurston gives his impression of Tony Hsieh's keynote.

(Credit: Twitter)

AUSTIN, Texas--In the dot-com world, Tony Hsieh's story is pretty much canon.

We know he got his entrepreneurial start running a pizza delivery business in college, and eventually went on to co-found LinkExchange and sell it to Microsoft for $265 million.

Then, after founding a venture firm that invested in shoe retail start-up Zappos.com, he took over the helm of the company and has been there ever since. Now nearly 10 years old, Zappos has become renowned among the digerati for its heavy investment in top-notch customer service, quirky company culture, and use of Twitter to promote corporate transparency.

"We put our 1-800 number at the top of every Web page, and we encourage our customers to call us even if it's not to make a sale," the soft-spoken Hsieh said Saturday in his keynote address here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "The telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for 5 to 10 minutes."

With thousands of people filling up the Austin Convention Center's biggest ballroom and several surrounding simulcast rooms, Hsieh had a chance to really shake up the conversation in the digital-media set. Unfortunately, he didn't do it.

CEO Tony Hsieh--in a photo not from SXSW.

(Credit: Zappos.com)

He explained some of the company's idiosyncrasies: the fact that it will pay new hires $2,000 to leave the company just to make sure they're completely on board with their new jobs, the fact that customer service representatives are instructed to direct customers to better deals at competing retailers if they exist, the "Culture Book" that contains unedited contributions from every Zappos employee. Many of those in the audience probably knew most of this already. Hsieh, after all, has become a conference-circuit regular.

"The thing that ties all of these things together is really that Zappos is about delivering happiness, whether it's to customers or to employees or even to our vendors or other customers that we work with," Hsieh said.

He went through Zappos' 10 "core values," which include "build a positive team and family spirit," "do more with less," and "create fun and a little weirdness." He talked about "frameworks of happiness" and recommended some books like Timothy Ferriss' "The Four Hour Work Week" and Chip Conley's "Peak." It was a talk that would have been perfectly attuned to an audience of old-school marketers that needed to hear something totally new.

"A company's culture and a company's brand are just two sides of the same coin," Hsieh insisted. OK. But that's nothing that anyone who's been involved in the business of the Web hasn't heard before, many times. This is the sort of thing that unfortunately became a hallmark of the dot-com bust when companies invested too heavily in foosball tables and not enough in revenue models. Then, of course, there's Google and all things "Googly."

What Hsieh could have addressed was the fact that while so many of the nodding heads in the audience claim they fully grasp the admirable values that power Zappos, in reality there's a whole lot of hypocrisy out there--not to mention uncertainty. He talked about both the importance of personal branding and his distaste for egomania, two things that some people in the audience might find mutually exclusive. He mentioned "doing more with less" as a core value of Zappos, but not once even made reference to the dire financial climate. How, for example, do we have to try differently to focus on happiness these days?

Hsieh has the enormous respect of an industry. But if he's going to live up to the visionary hype, he's going to have to do more than just talk about what his company's done right and recommending a few business books.

Facebook's Dave Morin gets social with a Flip video camera before his talk.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

Updated at 10:12 a.m. PDT.

AUSTIN, Texas--"A joke I always make here is that if your friend did something on the Internet and you didn't hear about it, did it actually happen?" Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin said as he described the social network's renewed focus on a real-time stream of updates of friends' activities across the Web.

"We're happy to announce today that you have more control over the stream than ever before," Morin said, showing off screenshots of the recently redesigned Facebook homepage, which he said is now live for all members. "You have the ability to add and remove the people whose voices you care about the most."

More importantly? Facebook Connect has come to the iPhone. Read on.

Morin kept things lively, bringing up special guests like Seesmic founder Loic le Meur, who showed off the first-ever desktop client for Facebook, and Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk, who talked about using Facebook fan pages for personal branding.

"I wanted more than 5,000 friends," Vaynerchuk said, referring to the friends-list limit for normal Facebook profiles.. "I want to meet every person on Earth, and I want to buy the New York Jets. And a product like this allows me to do this, I think...This is word-of-mouth on steroids."

Morin's talk was Facebook's big SXSWi event. It was a far cry from last year's keynote address, in which famously awkward CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed onstage by BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy and the audience started to heckle when they didn't hear what they wanted to.

This year, the talk was a smaller one--albeit one that packed the room--led by the more extroverted Morin, who took the stage in cowboy boots and a suede jacket and responded to glitches and fluctuations with the room's lighting system by saying, "This is pretty awesome. It's a dance party!"

Morin's discussion, called "The Search for a More Social Web," comes at a time when Facebook has opted to start crawling out of its shell. Unlike many other big social networks, Facebook has traditionally kept its content behind a log-in wall, with only limited information available to search engines and nonmembers. But the Facebook Connect universal log-in service, launched last year, gives third-party sites the ability to let users register with their existing Facebook credentials. What users do on the third-party sites then gets reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook.

And this month, the social network launched not only reconfigured public profiles for brands, companies, and celebrities, but also redesigned versions of its homepage and profile pages that many observers and critics compared with the stream-like feed format of the uber-open Twitter.

"We think that the stream is an important concept that all of us on the Internet are working toward," Morin said, "and we think it's going to be a template for the future."

What's also important is Facebook Connect, Morin explained. He showed off examples from Joost to Xobni to iPhoto that have been souping up their social-networking offerings with the log-in standard.

"We have one more thing," Morin said at the end in an obvious nod to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "It's all about mobile and the iPhone, so today we're announcing Facebook Connect for the iPhone. For the first time, your iPhone apps can now have friends."

This means an application developer that has created an app for both the iPhone and Facebook can invite players to interact with one another cross-platform.

Launch partners are primarily games: among them are the Social Gaming Network (SGN), Tapulous, Zynga, and Playfish. SGN founder Shervin Pishevar showed off a new game called Agency Wars, in which players can take on the roles as spies and use geolocation to ambush friends in the real world on both Facebook and the iPhone.

"With the Facebook implementation, you can see all of your friends and recruit them to your agency and go on missions with them worldwide," Pishevar said.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't do this," Tapulous founder Andrew Lacy said of Facebook Connect for the iPhone.

But not all the launch partners were games: there was also Urbanspoon, an iPhone app that lets you randomly find restaurants nearby with a slot-machine format. Developer Patrick O'Donnell showed off how Facebook Connect has come to Urbanspoon: "One of the core missions of Urbanspoon is to bring together all the voices that you trust when you're trying to find out where to eat," he said. Photos and reviews can be added from Facebook accounts, and Urbanspoon preferences now show up in Facebook news feeds.

And movie-reviews app Flixster showed off how its iPhone app now lets members find Facebook friends who want to see the same movies and see what movies they've liked.

Morin said that Facebook Connect integration for the iPhone is soon coming from the likes of Slide, Loopt, MTV, EA Sports, Citizen Sports, and Pinger.

For more interested developers, Morin said that a new round of funding has been added to its FBFund developer seed fund specifically for iPhone developers.

"It's not just the search for social anymore, but we now have the social Web that we've all been dreaming of," he concluded.

This is about one-fifteenth of the line to get a SXSW badge.

(Credit: Andrew Mager/CBS Interactive)

AUSTIN, Texas--OK, there has got to be a better way to do this.

I arrived at the Austin Convention Center 45 minutes before the start of a talk on Friday afternoon that I was hoping to catch, "The Ecosystem of News" led by Outside.in founder Steven Johnson. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough time: the line-waiting time was clocking in at around an hour.

By the time I made it over to the room where Johnson's talk was being held, the room was full and no one else was being allowed in. There was no simulcast. (Luckily, my colleague Daniel Terdiman was there to see what Johnson had to say.)

The conference that's arguably the biggest must-attend for the digitally edgy has a check-in process that was painfully analog; I've been to plenty of big tech-industry trade shows and I've never waited for that long in line. Granted, with the number of concerts and film screenings that are part of the two other South by Southwest extravaganzas (SXSW Music and SXSW Film) are a big draw, and SXSW is consequently more likely to have to deal with people making counterfeit badges and sneaking into events than, say, the Web 2.0 Expo. And to be fair, SXSW Film attendees were waiting in the same line as those for SXSWi.

But still. You don't want the biggest topic of conversation at Day 1's after-parties to be the fact that it took an hour just to check in. Here's my suggestion for SXSWi 2010: Have a contest to revolutionize the conference check-in process. It's going to be especially crucial if SXSWi continues to grow. There are so many creative minds that come to this event every year; there would certainly be some interesting ideas.

For the winner, give away a jet pack or something. Those will exist in a year, right?