What Happened at South By Southwest? A Google Guy Explains.
by Peter Kafka
Posted on March 16, 2009 at 6:40 AM PT
Confession: A whole lot of what happens at South By Southwest is above and beyond the capacity of your humble correspondent to understand or explain.
Luckily, we have a professional willing to interpret the goings-on, free of charge. Meet Kevin Marks, whose business card describes him as “developer advocate” at Google (GOOG).
Marks, who has previously put in time at Apple (AAPL) and Technorati as an engineer, now has a job that seems to involve being an, um, advocate on behalf of his employer, specifically for its OpenSocial program. I think of OpenSocial as the “everyone but Facebook” social-network alliance, and Marks didn’t disabuse of me that notion in our chat on Sunday.
But he did add some layers of nuance, and he was game when I asked him to tell me what the theme of the conference has been so far. In a word: Twitter.
The longer version is here:
Comments
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.
At least he didn’t invoke the idea of “push” techniques.
As a washed up “engineer” maybe I should add the word “advocate” to my resume.
And develop a convincing British accent.
I’ll be twittering for ideas about what I should be advocating next (not).
Posted by Mac Beach at March 16th, 2009 at 11:14 amPS:
On what happened at SXSW;
Same as usual. Lot of people got drunk on company time. The rest (unemployed) got drunk on their own time.
Apparently the world hasn’t ended after all.
Posted by Mac Beach at March 16th, 2009 at 11:18 amBlogging didn’t disrupt news media, low cost online advertising disrupted news media.
Posted by Tom Foremski at March 16th, 2009 at 4:00 pm@Tom – true that.
Posted by Peter Kafka at March 17th, 2009 at 1:50 pmi think goog better come up with something soon…flakiness isn’t going to cut it next year
Posted by chris proctor at September 9th, 2009 at 9:22 pm