As digital media professionals from across the country and around the globe pack their bags for the annual trek to Austin, one question is emerging that will likely dominate the conversation at this year’s SXSW festival — can Twitter survive it’s own success?

Last year Twitter emerged as the runaway hit at an annual event that’s been described as spring break for geeks. At the time I speculated that something better would almost certainly come along within the next year. Surprisingly, a year later Twitter is still going strong. I say surprising, because Twitter is such a simple concept that it should have been easily usurped by something better.

In the past year Twitter has successfully resisted insurgencies from rival applications, including Jaiku, and to a lesser degree Pownce (which still lacks basic SMS support). That Twitter has succeeded where its competitors have failed is all the more amazing considering the downtime and performance issues the application has suffered.

Twitter’s performance problems have been blamed all manner of causes, including the service’s hosting environment, phenomenal user growth, the Rails platform, and the underlying application architecture. Regardless of the cause, the Twitter faithful continue to use the application, although they grumble mightily when the service fails.

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A social messaging application called Twitter has taken SxSW by storm like nothing in recent memory. It seems like everyone in Austin is either Twittering, deconstructing the relevance of Twitter, building a Twitter enhancement, or wondering why the hell they didn’t have the idea first. It’s pretty clear that SxSW 2007 will bee seen as the moment where Twitter hit its tipping point.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a web 2.0ish chat/SMS mashup that allows users to send quick messages to friends (or the world) from just about anywhere. Unlike traditional chat and SMS, Twitter seems to be more group based and messages have persistence. Your most recent twit becomes something of a short-term status for your entire life.

Twitter messages are the kind of thing most of us would never bother to put into a blog post. Unlike chat, they tend to be more like random messages to the universe — frequently with little or no discernible purpose.

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It’s that special time of year when we pack our bags and head for Texas. Our destination, of course, is SXSW Interactive (aka “Spring Break for Geeks”). The conference doesn’t kick off until Saturday, but Austin is such a happening place that we generally like to get there a day early just to hang around. The fact that Austin has free wireless Internet in every bar, and that margaritas are cheaper than water has (almost) nothing to do with our love of the city.

My personal goals for this year’s SXSW are:

1. Solve the mystery of the SXSW press room
2. Devour a few nuclear tacos
3. Meet a few (hundred) 9rules members
4. Drink Nick Denton into the poor house

As a result of all of this excitement, we may not be posting as regularly as we normally do. I’m not a big fan of live blogging during the sessions. It always seems to be a just a slightly more advanced form of stenography.

If you’re headed for Austin as well try to track us down and say Hi. And be sure to ask us for a Medialoper sticker. They’re hot off the presses and we’ve got more than we know what to do with.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, Austin

If Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso ever decides to give up business for comedy he might have a promising career ahead of him. The Internet is still laughing at his response to Steve Job’s open letter on DRM. Fortunately for Amoroso the humor was probably lost on the Hollywood executives the letter was intended to reach.

While music industry executives remain skeptical that they can make a buck in a DRM-free world, Amoroso is certain that his company needs DRM to survive. That’s because Macrovision’s business is DRM. By definition, the company survives by instilling fear in the hearts of entertainment industry executives. The last thing Macrovision needs is some upstart telling entertainment companies that DRM isn’t really necessary. Unlike Apple, Macrovision has nothing to sell but fear itself.

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I’ve spent most of my adult life assuming that technology was in an endless upward spiral that would always provide me with a never ending supply of a) fast computers, b) cheap storage, and c) massive bandwidth. You can imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that we are apparently on the verge of a global bandwidth shortage. If true, that would certainly change most of my assumptions about the future of media, computing, and civilization as we know it.

My first inkling that we might have a serious problem came last week when a Google representative, speaking at the Cable Europe Congress, announced:

The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.

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It’s a special Valentines Day exclusive from Medialoper! There is nowhere else in the world where you can read this exact story!

Coming up later in this post, the story of my night of passion with Anna Nicole Smith!

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When we started Medialoper a year ago, I had no idea what to expect. After all, we’d been having these discussions about media and technology and entertainment for a very long time and we were excited about translating them to the web, but there is a huge difference between red wine and whiskey-fueled bull sessions and sitting down and writing a well-researched, well-reasoned analysis on the latest developments in these fields.

And blogging? On a regular basis? Me? Hell, I’ve got a New Yorker cartoon pinned on my cubicle wall of one dog saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

What I hadn’t counted on was how fun it is to do this.

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It’s been quite a year for the whole Medialoper team. We launched this site just 11 months ago in an effort to document the changing media and technology landscape. Our timing couldn’t have been better, as 2006 will undoubtedly be remembered as the year convergence became a reality.

As we near the end of our first year online I’m happy to announce that Medialoper has been asked to join the 9rules network.
We’re honored to be a part of such an exceptional community of sites.

If you aren’t familiar with 9rules please take an opportunity to explore the network. Regardless of your interests you’re bound to find some incredible sites you may not have known about.

If this is your first visit to Medialoper, welcome. Take a look around and let us know what you think

Technorati Tags: 9rules

Reddit’s Dead. That’s What I Said.

The social news site Reddit has been offline all morning. As a result geeks around the world are itching for a quick fix of links to an odd array of stories that seemingly have little in common.

It’s been suggested that Reddit’s outage might actually improve worker productivity in the tech industry. Personally, I think that sounds like crazy talk. I’m not about to let a Reddit outage suddenly make me more productive.

Here are a few things you can do while Reddit’s offline. Remember, any of these things beats actually going back to work:

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On Friday the other shoe finally dropped on the Tower Records franchise.
Tower’s assets were officially sold to a liquidation company as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. The Tower Records retail chain that so many people know and love is officially dead. Strangely, I won’t miss it.

As a music geek back in the early 80’s I practically grew up at Tower Records. I’d spend hours scouring Tower’s import bins looking for obscure gems to add to the KFSR playlist. These days people talk about building systems to enhance music discovery. Back in the day, Tower Records was the system for music discovery.

Tower maintains what is commonly referred to as a deep catalog. Through the years music geeks have gravitated to Tower because they knew the store stocked even the most obscure recordings. Now, of course, those very same music geeks have numerous alternatives to choose from. The very concept of deep catalog has morphed into the Long Tail and Tower Records has become a victim of the very retail concept that it helped create.

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