Saturday, March 1, 2008

“The next Twitter”

After SXSW 2007 became Twitter‘s de facto coming out party, pundits all over the web dubbed the South by Southwest Interactive conference a potential social web app kingmaker and began speculating about which project would rise to the top next. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web handicaps a list of candidates for this year.

A winning app has to be easy for lots of people to use and has to provide clear value to conference and party-goers. It might seem valuable only at SXSW but end up proving itself afterwards due the scale achieved in Austin. ...

Buzz momentum leading up to the event is also very important. If a good number of savvy web lovers have just become power users of an app before SXSW, it stands a great chance of reaching critical mass there.

Finally, it has to perform reasonably well for a high-traffic week. Other than a underwhelming hallway demonstration, Twitter held up better at SXSW last week than it has at almost any time since.

For me, at least as far as SXSW is concerned, I think “the next Twitter” will be...Twitter. It’s just so darned useful for spontaneous organizing and status check-ins (and it appears as though it’s shoring up in preparation for SXSW). What about you? What’s your SXSW killer app?