Damon and I arrived in Austin, Texas, last Thursday to do our best to represent the Trendwatch Daily team and the Fullsix Group in THE Interactive Festival of the Year, SxSW (pronounced South by South West). It’s our first time here and we’re thrilled by the high quality of the speakers, from Jason Fried (Founder of 37 Signal) to Michael Lopp (Senior Engineering Manager at Apple). Topics are definitively super inspiring (Top 10 Lessons learned in e-commerce by Zappo’s CEO, Social Marketing Metrics Strategies…).
The main event was expected to be the Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote, CEO of Facebook, and we haven’t been disappointed. The auditorium was packed with a super-excited crowd, ready to listen to the 23-year-old billionaire speak about the social network site and the challenges encountered in the recent past (think NewsFeed, Beacon, Privacy, Openness…). But it didn’t go that well, because of a very weird dynamic between him and the over-friendly and egocentric interviewer, author and journalist Sarah Lacy. Questions asked were boring, and she was mainly interested about talking about herself and her upcoming book than trying to challenge Zuckerberg.
Members of the audience were quick to express their frustration, both online (Twitter and Meebo dedicated channel for SxSW) and in the room, someone shouting her “Ask interesting questions”, while even the young CEO was being annoyed by her self-oriented endless questions, answering with a mere : “OK”, “Sure” and finishing her with a “You have to ask questions”, since she kept telling uncomfortable stories about their first encounters. Which generated a huge cheer from the crowd, booing the famous journalist, forcing her to give up on the interview and, Digg-style, pass the microphone to the crowd for a (disappointingly) super short Q&A session where topics like data portability, application saturation and privacy finally got a chance to be discussed.
Tomorrow, on the menu: Going social now, Judo moves for defending your reputation online, and more taco/margaritas overdose. We’ll certainly come back to our respective offices with great topics to share with you here but also in the next issue of the Trendwatch Keynote. So stay tuned by subscribe to our RSS feed or our daily digest email for your inbox.
By the way, if you’re like my friend Sylvie who was waiting for the French version of Facebook, Sarah Lacy broke the secrecy and announced it in front of a shocked Zuckerberg that it would be released on Sunday night. Still not spotted on the site though.
If you’re in Austin and want to meet at one of the 20+ party tomorrow, leave a comment or drop us a line!
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