Have A Shiner Bock with Me at SXSW

Just a quick note to all you SXSW folks out there that I’m down in my home town of Austin for the festivities, and you should track me down for a drink if you like. The energy and breadth of the conference on day 1 was inspiring. Douglas Price, Tim Ferris, Mike Cassidy, and Eve Phillips, and I all went out for a lengthy meal and great conversation at Austin’s finest, the Driskill, and I was ecstatic this morning to learn Tim’s healthy drinking tips actually work.

I’ll be firing up Eve’s Chirp via Bootcamp later today.  Their first app is a social media filter that includes a screen saver displaying photos from your various social media outlets. All you Windows users out there should give it a try.  We also had fun listening to Doug’s latest album, Mass Processor.

If you want to survive SXSW or life with the bottle generally, I second Tim’s recommendation of “Chaser”, carbon-based pills that help ward off hangovers. They work. We picked them up in a corner store on 6th St., but you should be able to find them at GNC or pharmacies.

I’ll be down here through next Wed, so come grab me or shoot me an e-mail at ‘a-at-littleshoot dot org’.  Oh, and if you’re at the conference, check out Pliny Fisk’s (aka my dad) panel on Tuesday on Visualizing Sustainability.  He always has something interesting to say.  Mike Cassidy and Tim Ferriss’s panel later today on efficiently and quickly achieving goals, from writing a #1 New York Times bestseller to building and selling a company for $500 million 2 years after the founding, should also be a hit.  Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter) and Cali Lewis are on the panel as well.

If you’re having trouble finding me, I’ll probably be off in the corner somewhere on my laptop working on porting LittleShoot to Facebook.

OpenSocial, Facebook, Google, OpenGadgets

I still find all of the attacks on OpenSocial to be naive. Did anyone ever really think each company would open up it’s social graph? Apparently so, but I certainly didn’t. How could Google possibly get everyone to join and dictate they all open their data? One step at a time! Perhaps I’ve never been disappointed because I never conceived of OpenSocial as anything but OpenGadgets. I don’t think the importance of OpenGadgets should be overlooked, however. Google Gadgets is a generally sound approach to standardizing gadget making using html and JavaScript. It’s certainly a big step up from learning some new proprietary markup language invented by Zuckerburg & co.

Perhaps this ties in to my general disdain for Facebook. Sure, it’s a heck of a lot better than MySpace, but is that really saying much? It’s still a social network, which is just inherently cheesy and doesn’t solve any interesting technical problem whatsoever. I find it shocking there’s talk of people leaving Google to go to Facebook. Maybe I’m a tech snob, but old Sergey and Larry actually solved a really challenging technical problem at Google. It makes sense to me they have legions of programmers rallying behind them. Facebook? This guy was a freshman at Harvard who knew a little PHP. Not to mention he stole the idea from his “buddies” and broke away to do it on his own. There’s all this excitement about a company that’s just not interesting technically with sketchy business ethics? I just don’t get it.

I’ll stop soon, but let’s just touch on the “Facebook platform.” Come on. We really need another proprietary platform? There’s a platform I’ve come to know and love that’s simply an astounding place for innovation called the “Internet.” It’s really cool. It’s really open. I’ve come to like other platforms like Ning, but I just have no interest in writing something in Facebook’s markup language that will make them more advertising cash. People like Facebook because there’s money to be made. That’s the only conclusion I can make. It’s not a horrible reason, but we should at least call it like it is. All the ramblings about how innovative the platform is remind me of company valuations in the late 90s. A lot of talk. I have yet to see any truly innovative Facebook app. Seriously. Please don’t super poke me. Ever. Most Facebook apps are not only uninteresting, but I actively wish they didn’t exist. They make my life worse and waste my time.

I’ll take the Internet any day.