As I mentioned the other day, this weekend saw me give Twitter another try and so far I’ve been liking it. In many ways this has been because this second attempt to get the most well-known micro-blogging platform has coincided with the geek-fest that is the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which now has a big tech slant, as well as music & film.
Last year’s SXSW was a bit of a tipping point for Twitter (a twitting point if you like) as the tech-elite all used it to stay in touch, organise nights out & share their feelings on what was happening. This year has been no different and so I was able to watch, almost live, the reactions to the keynote address, which saw business journalist Sarah Lacy ‘interview’ Facebook founder, and poster-boy for repressed geeks with dreams of getting rich everywhere, Mark Zuckerberg.
To say that Lacy’s interview technique diddn’t go down well would be a huge understatement. Now I wasn’t there so can’t pass judgement. However from following the discussion on Twitter as it happened, as well as reading way too much coverage since the event, it strikes me that she may have fallen foul of naive organisers (never use a format which stops people who use digg from having their say), as well as the fact that she is, from watching the video of the interview, just a bit annoying. She’s also attractive, which always annoys sad geeks who never get to talk to women like that.
However what’s really interesting about all of this, at least to me, is that all of this basically happened on Twitter (and its bastard spawn, hashtags). The elite of the tech world have, in many ways, deserted Facebook (apart from Miss Lacy who has, rather cringingly, a fan page), which is something I would have thought might make Marky-Mark (it’s ok, he likes it when I call him that) a bit worried.
Not so worried that he’ll stop talking about the social graph and all that, but maybe just worried enough to give Twitter’s owners a call and see whether he can’t tempt them with a bit of the lunch money he got from Microsoft.
Lovely Twitter image by gapingvoid. Rock on.