Don’t die at SXSW

Photo credit: Lelya Kuhn

This will be my seventh straight year attending South by Southwest Interactive. It’s important to stay alive mentally and physically during the conference. Here are a few ways to do that, based on what I’ve learned over the years.

Wear comfortable walking shoes

You’re going to walk everywhere: to hotels, parties, restaurants, and at least 163 loops through the Austin Convention Center, which is the size of a small city. Be good to your feet. I’m a fan of Sauconys.

Avoid your hometown crew

You’ll likely feel the urge to pal around with people you already know from back home. Resist this. Meet hundreds of new people instead. Divide, conquer, and report back to them later. You’ll see your local friends when you’re back home.

Don’t cave to elitism

Like every industry, the tech world has its share of pseudo-celebrities, primadonnas and toolbags with an inflated sense of worth. Don’t play their game. Don’t fawn over them. Don’t worry about what parties they’re at. If the line to a venue is too long, ditch it and find another one.

Replace one meal each day with a CLIF bar

I eat one of these each day for breakfast at SXSW. CLIF bars are packed with protein and will hold you over until lunch. Food expenses add up fast, and you can save $100-$120 by eating these instead.

Charge your immune system

You’re going to shake a lot of hands, swap a lot of germs, drink a lot of free drinks and ultimately get very little sleep. This is a recipe for an immune system crash on your way home (known as “South by Scurvy“.) Start boosting your immune system early and sustain it throughout the trip. Vitamin C has always worked well for me.

Prepare for phone death

Your smartphone battery will die quicker that you think. To keep it alive, invest in an external battery pack or snap-on case. I just picked up a Mophie Juice Pack Air for my iPhone.

Don’t live-tweet everything

Resist the urge to live-tweet every sentence from every panel and keynote. This will kill your phone (and you). Broadcast a few choice nuggets here and there, plus your own perspective. That’s enough.

Stay flexible

There are an infinite number of parties and panels to attend. Unless you’ve figured out how to clone yourself, there’s no way you can take it all in. RSVP to as many parties as you want, triple-book your panels at austin2012.sched.org, then decide what you want to do at the last minute.

Don’t listen to “veterans” like myself

Find your own fun. Make your own path. Most of all, have a blast.

P.S. … Here are a few more tips for first-timers at sxsw.com/first_time

Time Hoppin’

A few days ago I discovered this nifty little service called TimeHop. It’s good at doing one thing really well – reminding you what you were up to exactly one year ago today.

How does it work? You set up an account, connect it to your social networks of choice (currently Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram are the only options) and each day you receive an email that summarizes your one-year-ago activity.

Why is this interesting to a human being? The only word to describe what I feel when I receive my daily TimeHop is delight. It’s an uncomfortable word for me, so I use it sparingly. I’m delighted by very few things, mostly pictures of Corgis dressed as lobsters. My first TimeHop reminder told me I was at Bruegger’s on Ingersoll a year ago. I’ve only been there once, and it was the day I picked up bagels for an 8:00 am client meeting with Kemin Personal Care. This one detail triggered a series of other memories about that same day, which I’d completely forgotten about. Conversations I had. People I ran into. Other things that were happening in the world.

TimeHop is helping me build and extend my offboard brain. I’ll have you know that I’ve actually been working on my offboard brain for years. Every email I’ve sent or received since 2006 is stored in my Gmail account. That sounds insane, but all of those conversations are searchable, which reduces my need to actually remember the full context of most things. This frees up my physical brain to concentrate on more important tasks, like stressing out over whether the Megatron and Galvatron Wikipedia entries should be merged or not.

In all seriousness, we humans leave a lot of ephemeral data behind on social networks, wrapped around activities that may seem mundane at the time. (Warren Ellis called this landfill of ones and zeroes the “data shadow” back in 2006.) Tweeting that you ate a sandwich – when combined with location data and the context of everything else your experienced that day – suddenly becomes more interesting. It’s interesting because human brains didn’t evolve to catalog every single detail of our lives, and now we can start unlocking some of that.

TimeHop aligns well with another trend I’m seeing, which is our need to back-fill our Facebook Timelines. We’re fascinated by our past because we barrel through life taking so many experiences and moments for granted. Now we have the tools to start organizing, beyond a dusty box of old photos.

(Oh yeah, The Des Moines Register’s Sarah Day Owen posted about TimeHop today too!)

5 bad social media habits

1.) Stop using automated story aggregators like Paper.li

If you feel the urge to share an interesting blog post or news article with your Twitter audience, simply retweet or post a few choice links here and there. I’m all for individuals curating news, but Paper.li isn’t curation – it’s vomiting everything you’ve read onto the Internet. I’m not interested in everything you read. Use your filters. Know your audience and their expectations. Look up the meaning of “curate.” Stop contributing to data waste.

2.) Stop auto-posting between Twitter and Facebook

Think of these two networks as completely different worlds, with different populations and societal norms. You might think you’ve achieved maximum efficiency by writing a Facebook post and hooking up some application that auto-broadcasts that post to your Twitter account, but what you’ve really done is create a tweet that is ugly, off-putting, and typically broken off in mid-sentence. (Remember, Facebook allows more characters than Twitter’s 140 limit.) On that same note, your Facebook audience doesn’t want to see posts with @tags and #hashtags in them. They simply don’t function in that platform, and they lack context. By auto-posting between networks, you might save a few seconds in your day, but you’re also making yourself / your brand easier to ignore and unfollow.

3.) Stop scheduling your tweets

I believe that scheduled tweets are OK in moderation, but don’t ever schedule them for more than 24 hours out. You don’t want to be that guy who scheduled a promotional marketing message one week in advance, only to see it broadcast right in the middle of some huge disaster gripping the world’s attention. Like, Los Angeles collapses into the ocean after an earthquake, and you’re auto-tweeting about your next webinar. Also, if you feel victorious and productive by scheduling a week’s worth of tweets on Monday morning, your company should take the social media keys away from you immediately. It proves that you aren’t a fan of the platform. Find a team member who is.

(Do you see a theme emerging here? Automation is lazy.)

4.) Stop obsessing over your Klout score

Klout might become an interesting measure of “influence” in the future, but currently it’s all over the board. Scores vary wildly from day to day, so don’t declare a victory when you reach a 62. (You might be back to 30 tomorrow.) It’s meaningless, and so is your Twitter follower amount. Do good work and earn respect in your business community instead.

5.) Stop using social media to talk about social media

You’re a well-rounded human being, right? You have other interests and obsessions. Share those, too. Look at your feed – if 100% of it is the latest Seth Godin posts and poorly-researched Mashable articles, you need to diversify. Imagine if you picked up a telephone, called your friends and just talked about telephones. They’d hang up.

Data waste

What would you do if data storage ran out?

Imagine a future where storage capacity becomes a precious resource. Just like we’ll eventually run out of land to live on, or fossil fuels to consume.

Data barons would stake claim over all the available capacity and charge a premium to license their “land.” Maintaining your own underground servers and remote hard drives would be a criminal offense. You’d be charged money for pushing larger amounts of data to someone else’s servers (ie. lots of Facebook posts). You get the idea.

So what would you do differently, if you had to preserve every last gigabyte?

1.) You’d stop sending emails with these goofy disclaimers.

Each time an email is sent with one of these, it becomes data on a server. A few insignificant ones and zeros at first. Then it’s forwarded. And replied to. Think of the extreme data waste when you multiply that a thousand, a million, a trillion times. Not a problem today, but if you were conserving, you’d stop.

2.) You’d stop sending context-less “shouts” to Twitter.

During a crunch, you’d really start to think a lot about context. Is the tweet you’re generating adding to the common good of mankind, delivering new information, helping friends, making someone laugh, or benefiting you in some way? If not, you’d disable automatic shouts across a lot of platforms and apps.

3.) You’d send very brief emails.

Suddenly, you’ll thank Twitter for forcing you to think about communicating in 140 characters or less. Because you’ll be charged a tax on every email longer than three sentences by the data barons.

4.) You’d spend less time creating useless documents and spreadsheets.

That meeting recap as a Word document, then exported as a PDF? Is it really necessary? And did the meeting agenda PDF need to exist in the first place? That data has to sit on a server somewhere, and it’s going to cost you money.

Now, spend an entire work day pretending that this shortage exists, and see how your behavior changes. Then, instill this into your workplace culture. When you stop contributing to data waste and Internet white noise, I predict you’ll get a lot more efficient and a lot more done, and so will your team members.

Trim, cut and edit. And if you add anything, add value.

An escape to Path

I’m intrigued by the new social network Path, but I don’t know why.

First, let me explain a few things. I’m a joiner. I join new socnets every day. It’s my job to understand them. Typically, I forget about them five minutes later and only get reminded when the network sends me an email prompting me to sign back in. This results in conversations with myself that go something like: “Huh? When did I sign up for Glass? And what the hell is Glass?”

My point is that there’s a new one each day, and it’s tough to make noise in a world dominated by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. (Although 2011 was definitely the Year of the Pin.) So why do I keep checking in on Path?

I’m having trouble articulating it, so I thought I’d turn to the Twitter Machine. Mike Gerholdt talks about “sharing little moments”:

One unique thing about Path is that you indicate when you’ve gone to sleep, and when you wake up. At face value this may seem like useless information, but we’re entering an age where our devices will learn more and more about our bodies and physical activity through accelerometers. We’ll be able to do really interesting things with this data, long-term. (See Fitbit and Nike+ if you don’t believe me.)

Mike also mentions that the experience is uncluttered. Despite all of Facebook’s filters and management tools, the majority of us still experience the bloat of game updates, auto-posts from apps, drama, and friends we should have never friended. Travis seems to agree:

So is Path a miniature oasis? Facebook is our necessary day job and Path is a much-needed vacation? Last March I noticed a shift to more controlled, private online spaces – ie. teenagers drifting to locked-down Twitter accounts and early tech adopters jumping into group messaging apps.

Path is intriguing because it might be the first network to step up and fill this need.

4 questions for Michael Bay

Michael Bay, I have four questions for you regarding Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

1. Why was Megatron wearing a cape?
2. Why was Megatron being eaten by bugs?
3. Do you hate women?
4. Why is Albert Einstein an Autobot?

As a fan of the original Transformers cartoons and comics, I’m mandated by law and a personal love of self-torture to watch your three disastrous “films.” And after watching the third one – a sweeping, thinking-man’s epic where robots go to the Moon and get into arguments with the lady from Fargo – I can’t help but be consumed by these questions.

Good work on casting Shia LeBeouf as the kid from Indiana Jones 4 and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, btw. And I’m shocked that Buckcherry didn’t make it onto the soundtrack, with your record of including the world’s other worst bands (Nickelback, Linkin Park, Staind and the Goo Goo Dolls) on previous movies.

Devastator is not a gorilla, asshole.

The Netflix Fast-Forward

This morning Netflix announced that its DVD-by-mail business would remain under the Netflix umbrella, instead of the Qwikster “brand” – a brand that was enthusiastically embraced by everyone on the Internet. (End sarcasm.)

The company’s reversal queued up Round Three of junior marketing professionals armchair-quarterback-tweeting CEO Reed Hastings‘ decisions, latching onto the #FAIL hashtag and calling for his dismissal. The majority of these people have never started a company or managed a large brand, and as soon as the Mashable/TechCrunch headline and retweet churn quieted down, they all immediately went back to tweeting about the Kardashians.

Reed Hastings is not an idiot, nor is he out to personally inconvenience your ability to watch movies.

It’s worth examining some of his recent decisions, though – and why he made them.

Why split Netflix in two? Understand that first and foremost Netflix is a content delivery company, not a plastic disc in your mailbox company. When the split was first announced, it actually made sense to me – at least in terms of operations and logistics. DVDs require warehouses and postage. Content streaming requires web servers. This was clearly a move to go “all in” toward a Utopian future where 100% of all content from all time is available for streaming on-demand.

Our telecommunications infrastructure doesn’t support that yet, and entertainment studios are totally uncomfortable with it, but that is the future Reed Hastings is banking on. It’s a future that absolutely will happen. The split was a bold move to speed all of this up (something Steve Jobs was really good at).

We can put Qwikster in the Museum of Internet Oddities along with Kozmo and Flooz.

A couple of problems arose with the proposed split. Many took issue with the Qwikster name. It did seem a bit odd to me, but I just filed it away as a minor annoyance. Others were upset about having to log in to two separate websites and enter billing information twice.

My main concern was the fact that my Entertainment DNA might get ripped in half. Here’s what I mean: Pandora is built upon the Music Genome concept, meaning that various musical attributes (vocals, lyrics, harmony, etc.) are “genes” that form a large genome. As users of the service, our individual taste in music influences the genome, and it in turn influences us. Amazon.com does the same thing with e-commerce and our buying history. Netflix lets us rate what we’ve watched to make the system smarter about what it suggests we watch next.

You like Mad Men? You might also like Boardwalk Empire! That’s your Entertainment DNA talking. If it gets things wrong, you tweak it. You invest time in it. You nurture it. You expect it to always remain intact.

I want to rate Shark Attack 3: Megalodon as a one-star pile of shit once, not twice. My hope was that, at the very least, the Netflix and Qwikster services would be able to talk to each other and share my viewing data through some sort of centralized account. Even though I choose to watch certain content via DVD and other content via streaming, in theory those preferences should still influence one another.

A statement by Reed Hastings appeared coded: “There is a difference between moving quickly—which Netflix has done very well for years—and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”

Translation: “We tried to fast-forward to a future where 100% of everything is available online, and Netflix was poised to bring that that to you. Many of you freaked out. You’ll still have your red envelopes for now, but we’re quietly preparing for that future.”

Above photo: _tar0_ via flickr

Reborn with Timeline

During September’s f8 developer conference, Facebook unveiled Timeline – a chronological view of our lives that will eventually replace our existing Profiles.

On a purely visual and emotional level, this is one of the most stunning innovations Facebook has made in years. Set up your Timeline and start scrolling back through the years and you’ll see (and feel) what I mean. They’ll roll it out soon to all users, but here’s a way to set it up in advance if you can’t wait.

Timeline gives us all the chance to be Facebookborn.

Let me define that. My good friend Greg Swan has three children and all of them have Facebook accounts. The kids are not making status updates (they’re busy drawing dinosaurs) – but Greg uses the accounts as a platform to share photos and milestones for other family members to see. Essentially, Greg was curating a timeline and friendships (mostly family and close friends) for his children before Timeline the Feature really existed.

Greg set up the accounts right away – within a month of birth. This is what I refer to as being Facebookborn. Some parents might scoff at having accounts for their children, yet sharing ultrasound photos, announcing births and delivery room status updates are already mainstream forms of behavior on social networks. Just like our parents handed us the keys to our first car at age 16, Greg will do the same – he’ll hand over the usernames and passwords to his kids when they’re ready to take over their Facebook accounts.

Timeline gives us the chance to “back fill” our lives and experiences prior to 2006-2007, when Facebook usage started for most mainstream users. We can annotate our history with our first apartment, pets, our first car, deaths in the family – even when we broke an arm. And chances are, we have photos to go with all of these moments. We’ll upload them of course, because Timeline is just so inviting.

Millions of robust Timelines make Facebook even more valuable as a business. The amount of data we’re going to voluntarily enter into this platform (because it’s fun) is a marketer’s dream. And at what point does Facebook become a living, breathing, real-time version of the U.S. Census?

Before Timeline, Facebook had a jumble of content about our lives, spread out across friendships, photo albums and status updates. Now it’s all woven together through the thread of time as context.

Welcome to your new scrapbook.

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

Steve Jobs created technology that human beings actually want to use.

Jobs knew that technology shouldn’t be a pain in the ass, and he was obsessed with creating machines that grandmas and two-year olds could pick up and intuitively know what to do next.

Years from now, when every human being on Earth is networked in some way, let’s not forget the devices and interfaces that brought connectedness to the mainstream. Devices that were inviting, intuitive, and somehow “got” us as human beings. Devices that forced technology to evolve in their wake.

Steve Jobs sped up technological evolution (and possibly our own) through sheer force of will, and that is his legacy. He passed away today.

Below: A 2005 Stanford University commencement address, in which Steve touches on his own mortality and preparing to die.

Self-Inflicted Dune Torture

Dune is one of those movies that I caught pieces of as a kid, but never fully embraced or got into. Recently I’ve been making a point to re-watch a lot of sci-fi, and I deluded myself into thinking that I never “got” Dune because it wasn’t marketed to me via action figures and lunchboxes – so I owed it another chance as an adult, right?

No, Dune is simply a horrible disaster of a film.

This is perplexing, because I’m a superfan of everything David Lynch (the director) does. Dune has bits of signature David Lynch stuff, such as an ever-present sense of dread, anxiety-inducing sound design, heavy industrial imagery, and an unforgettably creepy villain – but the movie’s bottom falls out quickly, spiraling it into a convoluted mess. The sci-fi works of others are clearly not something Lynch should ever touch, with their pre-set rules, themes and worlds. He’s best when creating his own narrative. (Can you imagine what Return of the Jedi would have looked like if Lynch had accepted the offer to direct?)

Maybe the project was doomed from the start. I’m fascinated by the development hell that Dune went through, including multiple studios and an early cast that included Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger. (WTF??)

So I’ve checked the sandworm box. On to the next one.