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SXSW Keynote: Evan Williams of Twitter
Panel: Evan Williams keynote (Twitter hashtag: #evwilliams)
Date/time: 2 p.m., Monday
Panelists: Evan Williams (Twitter), Umair Haque (Havas Media Lab)
The gist: After fest director Hugh Forrest reminded the audience that Twitter got its start in 2007 when it began to make its public push at SXSW Interactive, Twitter CEO Evan Williams broke news early. He announced that a new platform, “@Anywhere” was set to debut on several content-heavy sites including The New York Times, Amazon.com and The Huffington Post. He explained that the platform allows sites to integrate Twitter services onto their Web pages. Twitter users would be able to Tweet content from sites and sites can build Twitter communities (or have Twitter users log in with their Twitter IDs). The rest of the keynote focused primarily on Twitter’s business practices and Williams’ vision for the future of the company. The service transmits about 50 million Tweets a day.
Though Williams’ keynote was perhaps the most anticipated event of SXSW Interactive, some attendees left the crowded Exhibit Hall 1 early and posts on Twitter itself criticized the panel for being unfocused, short on details about @Anywhere and, in a word, boring.
Slavin Rubin, one of the founders of start-up IndieGoGo, who drove from Miami to attend the fest, called the keynote, “Borderline terrible.”
“I thought that they were going to talk about either his experiences or advice from an entrepreneur or the guts and glory of Twitter. It felt very superficial, a lot of softballs,” Rubin said. “Twitter is so dynamic and has so much information and is so concise and offers so much stimulation… the things that were covered were the exact opposite of that.”
Matt Trego, an attendee in town from North Carolina, said, “It wasn’t as interesting as I thought. It was hard to follow the (wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk) talk.”
Twitter’s history is inextricably linked to SXSW Interactive’s recent explosive growth, Forrest said in his introduction. After Twitter put up screens at the festival in 2007 to promote their nascent service, it made headway with early tech adopters. In 2008 and 2009, Twitter became a vital part of the festival. In 2008, SXSW Interactive audience members attending an interview between BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used Twitter posts to help derail the presentation, creating a “Back-channel” effect that is still feared and marveled at within the tech industry.
Since then, hundreds of start-up companies have come to SXSW Interactive in hopes of being crowned the next Twitter.
Quotes: All from Williams: “It’s critical that it’s a two-way system.” Williams says he wants to “Make Twitter a tool for you that helps you get stuff done.” “People have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of attention.”
Takeaways: Williams says it wants users to spend less time on its Twitter.com Web site and more time exploring the online world with Twitter integrated into other Web sites and services. Williams continues to hope that people will use Twitter to get information quickly and to learn about the world around them and to have richer experiences online. “We want to make that easier, better, faster,” he said.
- Omar L. Gallaga
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2010
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By Chris
March 16, 2010 7:20 AM | Link to this
You fail to mention that the interviewer was exceedingly bland, failing to ask any interesting questions at all, or change the tone of the interview when it was apparent that half the audience was getting up to leave. Instead of "some people" it was more like hundreds of people walking out of the keynote. By the end, it was less than half full.
By Twittering (bad word) are lame
March 15, 2010 4:34 PM | Link to this
Twitter is soooooooo 2009. Get with the program.