SXSW

I was privileged enough to go to South by Southwest Interactive this weekend.  I’m quite tired, but it was definitely worth it.  I went to as many panels as I could, and there were a lot of really great ones.

Highlights:

• The creator of Slideshare showing off the really slick Ajax he did to absolutely maximize usability.  SWFUpload is a technology I will definitely be using in the future.
• Michael Lopp, a product manager at Apple whose opinions I really respect showing how the creative design process works there, which is something I’ve wondered about.
• A panel composed of old-school marketing dinosaurs completely collapsing under the weight of the Twitter-enabled audience in a mini version of the Zuckerberg debacle.  Beautiful.  I missed the Zuckerberg thing in person, but these kind of audience revolts were happening all over the place.  If most of your audience is actively talking about you behind your back, they’re not going to put up with anything.
• Architects from Twitter, Six Apart, Meebo and more discussing their architecture struggles, which was great.
• Several of the people behind OpenID discussing the various implications of it.  I am now confident in saying that I don’t know how people will authenticate themselves on the web in twenty years, but I know they’ll be doing it over the OpenID protocol.  If you’re a small company today that wants to maximize user registrations (and who doesn’t), you should be accepting OpenIDs with the Yahoo button.  You can make it more generic after the public is better-educated.
• The creators of every major Javascript library (jQuery, Protoype, Scriptaculous, Dojo) on one panel discussing highly technical Javascript techniques.  I vote for SXSW to have more panels like this.
• Developers from Digg, Flickr, and Wordpress discussing their insane scalability.  I’ve been doing a lot of scalability research lately, and now I’m fairly confident I can build systems that can be scaled in the future.
• I stood next to Jeff Bezos for a couple of minutes, and had conversations with other important people.

All in all, it was a great experience.   I hope I get to solve my own scalability problems soon.