The Next Twitter… Nothing to Report
FYI, this is just a quick post between sessions… with a full recap of yesterday and today later tonight.
What’s Next?
So South by Southwest (SXSW) is famous for launching twitter, making twitter popular and last year for the launch of geo-location tools Gowalla and Foursquare. What’s this year’s big application or tool?
Zip. Zilch. Nada. Sorry to report that nothing is really hot besides the aforementioned tools (twitter and geo-location). Geo-location apps Gowalla and foursquare are really big this year, with both releasing new versions in time for SXSW. But nothing else has generated a ton of hype. I’ll search back through tweets from hash tags to see if there is anything new that I missed.
I’m not disappointed or surprised, because it’s hard to live up to that hype year in and year out. There has been a ton of great sessions thus far, I’ve met a lot of great folks from a variety of disciplines, but I haven’t met the next killer app.
Thanks for posting the article, was certainly a great read!
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by creativereason: The Next Twitter? Nope. Nothing to report #SXSW – http://is.gd/avYoD (quick blog post)…
Brian,
Thanks for briefly sharing your thoughts on SXSW. Are you having a good time?
I’m kinda glad to hear that SXSW isn’t currently being dominated by some “Next Big Twitter”, besides why should SXSW be THE event where these startups launch. Is there as much impact launching this year as there was last?
Thanks
- Josh
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@Josh. Thanks for the reply. Having a blast at SXSW and not having the “Next Big Twitter” doesn’t bother me in the least.
Besides reading Techcrunch prior to leaving for Austin (where it seemed every single post on the homepage was about a new geo-location app), the only product launched I’ve noticed here is one for AOL Seed. Launches haven’t seemed to be a big deal this year (besides the launch of new Gowalla and Foursquare versions) and that’s probably a wise move…
This is the echo chamber, yes it can make your product launch if you are twitter or foursquare / gowalla, but a launch here can be expensive and your product can easily be lost in the shuffle. Plus if you launch here and it fails, you may never gain those users again.
In my humble opinion, it would be a lot easier to do a soft launch, gain some loyal followers then jump into marketing at SXSW to get new ones once your product is rock solid and has some word of mouth promotion.
VenMo (https://venmo.com/) was on the street though did not make enough noise.
I saw them launch earlier this month at the NYTM.org event. I was a little sad today when returning from SXSW I saw press from PayPal in 4 different places over 3 medias. PayPal launched their own peer-to-peer payment system. What might save VenMo could be their SMS model and not being reliant on an application which allows VenMo to work access to all phones.