Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

I'm headed down to Austin for South By Southwest Interactive for the next several days. As I looked for my confirmation e-mail on my computer last night, I came across the one from the last time I went to SXSW -- in 2001. I tend to keep e-mail receipts for a long time. There's no good reason I've stayed away; in fact, it left a huge impression on me back then and is probably the event that cemented my certainty that I wanted to be immersed in this stuff as my career. I've been rarin to get back. I just haven't really had the opportunity to go again til now.

This morning as I wait for my flight I'm thinking about everything that has changed on the web since then. Look at this timeline of all of the acquisitions Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have done since the Fall of '01. Some of the links I was looking for to online reviews of that year's talks don't even resolve anymore. I remember sitting in the audience in a panel about Blogging, hearing speakers and names I'd never heard before but knew were supposed to be important. I remember wondering if Blogger's business model would work out(bought by Google a couple of years later), and thinking that 37Signals was a strange name and that they'd have a hard time sticking to their methodological guns in the face of difficult clients(they've made it work and made industry standards out of their frameworks). I also set up my first Blogger account in the fall of that year. I was more into linklists and heh material than blogging at that time.

Here's some symmetry -- back then everyone was talking about the potential of Evan Williams' Pyra Labs' Blogger tool. In '07 everyone is talking about the potential of Evan Williams' Obvious Corp's Twitter tool.

Lots of conference support tools and systems have grown up along the way as well. this year Toyota Yaris is offering free rides from the airport. There are several map-based interfaces showing where everything is in relation to each other. There's a fairly well developed SMS system for getting information about sessions and about Austin on the fly. And now with Twitter, there's a lightweight glue that stitches folks together in realtime via SMS, chat, and the web.