AUSTIN, Texas--I just rolled off a JetBlue flight where half the passengers were typing on MacBooks and talking about last night's episode of Lost and the other half were wearing worn-out band T-shirts and combat boots. Incoming text messages from Twitter are making my cell phone buzz off the hook. I have this sudden craving for baby-back ribs and a giant margarita.
I guess it must be South by Southwest.
I'll be here through Tuesday night for South by Southwest Interactive, the digital-culture arm of the festival, and I'm pumped. Unlike my seasoned colleague Daniel Terdiman, I've never been to SXSWi. Heck, this is my first time in Texas. But amid my naive wonderment at the local culture ("The barbecue here actually tastes good!") I'm hoping to pull in some fun interviews, cool news, and wacky photos. Hey, it's an amorphous five-day geekfest loaded with open bars. Who knows what'll happen?
OMG! There's a cowhide ottoman in my hotel room!
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)One thing's for sure: at Tuesday night's "Bigg Digg Shindigg," a massive party that the social news site is throwing on the final night of SXSWi, I bet a whole lot of people will be asking, "So who's the buyer?"
Additionally, I just got an interesting piece of bacn: a friend request to Dodgeball, the where-you-at text-messaging start-up that was bought by Google and largely forgotten as Twitter gained momentum. The friend who invited me said that he doesn't think Twitter's servers will survive the onslaught of SXSWi messaging and that he's using Dodgeball as a backup plan.
Or maybe Yahoo's FireEagle should've debuted a little sooner...
See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).
It's 35 degrees and windy in New York right now, but I have the good fortune to be packing up my bags and heading for Miami. No, it's not a vacation. I'm going to the Future of Web Apps conference, hosted by U.K.-based media and events firm Carsonified. I'll be there through Saturday.
Among the featured attractions at FOWA Miami are a wine tasting, an evening soiree at a South Beach nightclub, an afternoon "beach party," and a tug-of-war competition. Yeah, I'm pretty excited for that, even though I plan to politely decline to participate in tug-of-war.
But I'll also be hunting for buzz about hot social media topics like Google's OpenSocial and why it's not exactly speeding out of the gates, the possibilities for location-based networking, and whether Twitter will ever be anything more than a messaging tool for the figurative offspring of Silicon Valley.
Talk to you from the 305!
Hey, look, it's Boston. See any Mooninites?
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)Tomorrow morning, I'll be heading from New York to Boston to sit in on the dismissal hearing for the lawsuit that social networking site ConnectU has filed against current Silicon Valley darling Facebook. It's a long-running drama that goes back to when the founders of both sites were students at Harvard, and no one's entirely sure how it's going to turn out.
I'll have a story on the subject on News.com very soon. In the meantime, here's what some other news outlets have been saying in the weeks leading up to the case:
- Faceoff! [The Observer, UK]
- Facebook, accused of copying idea, gets hearing [Information Week]
- Facebook founder 'stole the idea' [The Telegraph, UK]
- A brief history of Mark Zuckerberg's legal woes [Valleywag]
- Brothers aim to hold Facebook founder accountable [CTV Canada]
- Are we in the last 24 hours of Facebook? [Pocket-Lint, UK]
Stay tuned!
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