If there's one thing I've noticed about social media, it's that through them, conversations about new technology are generally overwhelmingly and undeservedly positive. It's rare to find a tech announcement that doesn't result in someone shouting that "it will change technology forever!"
So I arrived at SXSW fully ready to tolerate a week of unbridled positivity with social media addicts, armed with an open mind and a mission to uncover the controversy about some of this new social tech on our show TechInterruption. What I found in Austin, however, was a slew of opinions that were accurately critical of some of the latest trends in technology. It was extremely refreshing to hear from tech enthusiasts who were actually taking time to take informed stances on trends like gamification, the location-based services "war," and group messaging.
Gamification
Gamification has been a hot topic in social technology for the last few months. Many websites are jumping at the chance to add levels, badges and items on top of their content. Personally, I think gamification is being abused, and many SXSW attendees agreed with me. Even gaming advocate Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken said in her featured speech on Sunday that she cringes at the term. She said that games must be more than just mechanics, they must have a story and a deeper meaning. Transferring game mechanics without a meaningful game base will not translate to the gaming benefits for which McGonigal stands. That doesn't mean gamification will never work; it has to be implemented properly in order to be effective. At this point, there's a lot of hype around it without a lot of validation.
Location Wars
@Schneidermike, @AaronStrout and I grabbed an interview with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams. When we asked him about his thoughts on winning the "raging war" everyone is talking about in the location space, he shook his head. The war is a myth, according to Williams. Gowalla, SCVNGR and foursquare are all after very different long-term goals. Williams said overlap was inevitable and mostly accidental, but that he wasn't going to take pins out of Gowalla just because foursquare had badges. Instead, he's focused on providing a virtual passport to the world.
I still think the location services are competitors, but after hearing from Josh, I'm relabeling the struggle among location-based services as a Cold War; not a Hot War.
Group Messaging
The hottest technology at SXSW by far was Group Messaging. Paradoxically, no one seemed to be truly excited about it. We asked a lot of SXSW attendees what they thought of GroupMe, Beluga, Kik and Fast Society. Many attendees, among them Jonathan Crowley of foursquare, nodded and said that Group Messaging was very useful.
But is it really that surprising? Making chat rooms mobile, is not all that incredible of a feat. Right now, I'm seeing very little differentiation among these applications, so it will be interesting to see which apps lose users due to instability, and which ones rise to the top by innovating.
To see more of what we were up to at SXSW, visit TechInterruption.com, and join our converation on #techi.