SXSW Interactive: Sunday Highlights - Visual Music Discovery, Hurricane Parties, and 4chan Founder

After a late start to the morning due to the much discussed Daylight Saving Time debacle, it was worth the effort required to get to the convention center to see Paul Lamere from The Echo Nest present on Visual Music Discovery. We are currently in the midst of a digital music revolution - generally we are only 3 clicks away from any song, and pretty much anyone with a laptop can now make music. This gives music consumers a paralyzingly large amount of choices, making it hard to actively seek out good new tunes. Lamere shared results from a study he did with 5000 listeners, who had on average 3500 songs each. A stunning 65% of each person's library was never listened to! This led him to the realization that there needed to be a better way to explore your own musical library as well.

Lamere proceeded to give several interesting examples of visual discovery that are highly recommended to play around with, including: Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, Mufin Player, and Discovr. Utilizing visualization engages the pattern-matching portion of the human brain, and allows you to more easily discover similar artists and songs both within your existing library and in the entire musical world. While there is no clear winner yet in this space, it is promising how much research is going into a better system than the standard playlist spreadsheet!

After a quick bite to eat (a surprisingly decent tofu hot dog from FedEx), we took a swing through the ScreenBurn Arcade. An overwhelming number of video game developers showcased their latest titles and gave attendees the chance to play them.

Next up was a one on one with Rene Pinnell, one of the co-founders of the Hurricane Party app. The goal of this recently released application is to give users an easy to meet up with friends for impromptu fun anytime (kickball, brunch, parties, etc), in real-time. Using your Facebook and mobile phone address book to start a network, it then allows you to choose friends you want to share Hurricane Party with. Brilliantly, your friends do not have to own smartphones to use the app - robust SMS (texting) code allows anyone to participate. The app officially launched on Friday and has steadily seen downloads, up to 3000 as of Sunday. The group hosted a Hurricane Party to benefit the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan on Sunday night, showing another way that SXSW tech can be used for good.

Sunday's keynote speaker, Chris Poole, founded the website 4chan, the largest image board online. With 12 million monthly users and a constant waterfall of content (nothing is archived), only the fittest survive on this site. Most internet memes result from the ingenuity of anonymous 4chan members, such as Y U NO guy and Forever Alone. By giving users complete anonymity, Poole believes that it allows for more honesty and creativity in the community. However, with his new site, Canvas currently in private beta, a Facebook connect login is required. Either way, Poole's end goal is to create a community that results in shared experiences in real-time online.

A final panel discussion on HTML5 and whether or not the web is dead rounded out the day. Through lively banter, the panel's participants agreed to disagree on most points, including how to define HTML5 (doctype versus semantic tools), browser wars (good vs bad), and websites versus apps. And with that, the official first weekend of SXSW came to a close, but with much more to experience and learn on the horizon. It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint, so keep on keeping on!

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