At a recent SXSW Interactive 2010 mixer we witnessed the following – people bumping iPhones, exchanging Twitter usernames and buying their own drinks. Which is a polite way of saying a ton of people showed up looking to network on social media paydays, but no one seemed to be cashing in yet. It’s as if everyone was following advice collected from keynote addresses, blogs and whatnot on how to properly socialize in the year 2010. It seemed like a hollow charade mixed with peer pressure. As if anyone will be seen as confident players in some Web x.0 freaknik… by iPhoning these newer Twitter IDs instead of swapping older business cards.

Long story short, LonerBoner met a bunch of people who seemed self-employed, freelancing or downright unemployable. Yet all having the idea that they’re movers and shakers in this social media clusterfuck of Tweeting your mobile blog updates to some Facebook page. All these lanyard losers seemed proud of the fact they were dropping money to see the CEO of Twitter. Which is a little questionable, as he’s not a Jim Jones or even Tony Robbins type. His message is only one of creating an abundance of meaningless information. Yet people seem intent on adopting “The 4-Hour Work Week” to autoblogging or “running their own shop,” based on solely on repurposing the cloud of social media soundbites.

The real issue now, is how can this information overload be filtered so that anything of worth differentiates itself from the blather that makes up 99% of the peer cloud that your follow? While Twitter, Facebook and RSS streams are novel, in that it used to take considerable amounts of money to reach a large audience, we’re now stuck sifting through considerable minutia. Is the next big profitable frontier, bots that can curate updates and order this info into something worth a quick glance?

On that note Benjamin Palmer threw up an interesting article on AdWeek, predicting API identity will bring about a web that’s more app based. Maybe can this can create a marketplace akin to the current mobile environment. Which might just allow for tools similar to Yahoo Pipes, which combs through batches of RSS feeds – filtering, sorting and checking for redundancies. It’d be nice to see people’s daily quips from various API accounts, distilled down to something that let’s me mute the moron chatter – without seeming impolite.

Now we earlier got on Palmer’s case, so it’s good to see that our tactless witticism  maybe came across as an intervention. Perhaps there’s an upside to all this thoughtless hate mongering, despite what the therapist advises.

Now that we’re yet AGAIN on the topic of The Barbarian Group, let us mention a site they built. At first, we thought it was a hilarious parody. Basically mocking the whole bullshit culture of this SXSW Interactive mixer by looking like a DIY kit for jokers looking to make a quick dime by clinging to search results.

This seems like the kinda spoof that Adbusters aspires to, summing up every generic site that’s trying to get you to buy shit or cluttered with ads. The best joke is the fucking obnoxiously large, yet ever present share bar (Facebook/Twitter/etc) sitting on top of a panicky “RSS! RSS! RSS!” ticker.

Turns out though, that the InternetOnlineWebsite.com is actually a staffing site built by TBG. Still crafty, but somewhat disappointing in that it wasn’t created as a jest of searing sarcasm. Yet perhaps giving hope to these conference goers, who wish to be employed doing simple tasks like advising on metadata strategy or SEO terms. As we still think the real payday from all this social media shit, is propagating the idea that companies need to hire staff to oversee all this blather.

Tags: Apps, Benjamin Palmer, SXSW, The Barbarian Group, Twitter, Yahoo Pipes
Posted in: General