Lessons from SXSW Interactive

I'm just back from Austin, and the South By Southwest Interactive extravaganza. Some of you will wonder how this could possibly be the first year I've gone, while others of you will ask how the music was, or look non-plussed and wonder why you should care.

If you don't read Mashable every day, here's the skinny on SXSWi. It's like Woodstock for the web generation, but the drugs have been replaced with micro-brews and instead of Hendrix we have the founder of Twitter. Put that way, it doesn't sound nearly as good; nevertheless, thousands of the makers of the web and quite a few masters of it converge upon Austin every year to listen, meet, and soak up the knowledge of the internet glitterati.

There's gigabytes of blog posts, pictures, and amateur videos exhaustively documenting the SXSWi experience, so I'm going to skip over that and instead talk about three lessons that I'll use and hopefully you will as well.

1. We need to think bigger. Applying powerful concepts like search and discovery to developing markets where information asymmetry still exists. Creating platforms instead of features. 
2. We aren't recognizing the tipping point from discovery to filtering the noise. The bias of youth is discovery, new people, new things. Important to preserve random collisions and serendipity, but a few years of experience and an job with the man will wear out your discovery dial real quick.
3. Small is the new big. Big uniformly sucked. Underwhelming keynotes, overcrowded parties with bad drinks and long lines, big brands handwaving about monetization and thought leadership and claiming the space. Everything that worked best at SXSWi was small. Tweetups among groups of influencers with common interests, private parties on buses and in hotel suites, talks and panels where rising stars emerged. This reflects a larger trend towards bite sized encounters, product iterations, hyperlocal news and communities.