South by Southwest is one of the most exciting festivals and conferences in the world. Every year, thousands of people converge on Austin, Texas to celebrate film, music and the interactive arts. It's where services like Twitter became famous, and Silicon Valley meets digital literates from all over the world.
Because this is a different sort of conference, submitted panels need to be voted on by potential attendees. The panels that people most want to see will get programmed; the others are free to come back and try again next year.
This year, we've submitted a panel about what we're calling the social cloud.
From the site: Social networks are walled gardens. Even if you can see content, you can't add people as friends from other networks, or keep track of their content in open, generic ways beyond RSS. Or can you? We'll give you tools to connect your site or application to the social cloud today.
This isn't cloud as in proprietary cloud computing of the sort rightly critcised by the likes of Tim O'Reilly. We're talking about a global, decentralised web of social connections that operates through open standards and generic APIs, much like the World Wide Web itself. We see this happening partially through the Open Data Definition, and we'll be explaining how to make it work in practice, not at some arbitrary point in the future, but now.
With people like Kevin Marks - one of the people behind OpenSocial - talking about contributing in the comments, it promises to be an interesting hour. All we ask is that if you'd like to see it, please head over to the panel page on the SXSW site and vote. We'd love to see you there.
