blackrimglasses.com

tagged: web2con

2000 party over its out of time. Doo doo, doo doo doo

So yes, it was the party. The party of the century! The last century! With different sites!

Javascript! AJAX! CSS! XHTML! Black Rim Glasses on geeky boys who looked out of place drinking beer….!!!!!!!

My god was it fun.

So it was this party, it was at a bar, it had maybe 3000 people crammed into a space the size of a phone booth. Thank god hygene improved since the first dot.com boom. God, parties then like this were kind of smelly.

Scenario:

Geek: “I just spent 35 hours debugging an AMAZING fucking Java class! It’s a multithreaded worker factory! Holy shit!”

Me (bigger geek): “Great. You smell.”

Tonight was much better than that. There were celebrities there in the form of geeks with high page-ranks. I actually, I swear to god, saw a PR8 there. He was walking around like he owned the place, with hot babes on his arms. And I swear a PR9 was doing lines of Claritin in the bathroom. Dust, you know.

I met a fair load of people, including the crew from Slide including a good friend from High School who I haven’t seen since June of 1997, Johnnie Manzari. Crazy. I am probably the worst person ever for keeping in touch with High School friends. Literally, school ended, I left. I saw one person at Bridge School 2001 (I hated her). She actually asked, while I was standing next to an REM band member if I was still an REM fan. True story. I also do run into ocasionally another high school friend because our moms are good friends (hi Elene).

Anyhow, I hated high school. When I left I kind of did what I usually do: this is over, next thing now, bye. Running into Johnnie was cool because well, we were both uber-geeks at a Web 2.0 party. He works at Slide, I’m at WBR. Funny how things work.

Other fun: running into an old Stipean friend, meeting some cool folks from Adaptive Path, my friend Brooke and free drinks/food.

OK, back to the other stuff. This party reminded me heavily of parties from 1999. I know I wasn’t the only one that tought so. The money is back, in some way. Some people will get rich (I hope to be one at some point), but I’m beginning to think that right now we’re in this state of optimism, and that is a dangerous place to be.

The problem with these parties, and even these conferences, is that the segment of the market that they appeal to is so narrow and self-congratulatory. It is wonderful that del.icio.us is doing so well, but I swear to god that site is just like a dance on a Linux cruise. Sure, you’re on a cruise, and you might get laid, but you’re all geeks. del.icio.us is brilliant, but it hasn’t hit that tipping point yet. For one, how do you tell people the URL? I can’t get my parents to type http://mail.murmurs.com as they think they need the www. Slim fucking chance they’ll use del.icio.us.

A lot of the things that we’re seeing here are like that, and the parties and the conference don’t help. We are reaching a new state in the Web, one that is born out of the desire to finally reconcile the role of people within the data they create implicitly and explicitly. The problem is, while we can create companies around this fact, and throw nice parties, the fact is that the audience so far are fellow geeks for most of these things.

Weblogs Inc succeeded because their market segment extended to everyone through their deliberate obfuscation of technological sophistication. MySpace succeeded because you could be a moron and make a webpage (Geocities model). Then they threw music on, and boom. These services reached a tipping point because they fulfilled a need, filled it well, did it with style and minimal fuss.

Parties like tonight seem a bit premature. They are fun, they are geeky as hell (I saw so much open, public Treo sex that I felt dirty and unclean) but they also are kind of geek pride meetings. And hell, I’m all for geek pride, but I’m also for quite revolutions. I wish this one stayed quiet, but I know that money follows noise.

So I guess I should make some noise, eh?

Well, the party was fun all in all. I met interesting people and observed interesting primal behavior among a very interesting group. It was very different from LA parties, I’ll tell you that. In LA, cultural cache is not your inbound links in Technorati. And Technorati people do not lounge like male lions after a hunt.

The party though, was loud and kind of crowded. I lost my voice, so at that point I left. I did meet someone from Corante, Stowe Boyd in fact, the president of that company. That was cool.

Tomorrow I go home, and next week I come back up. San Francisco, how I do love you.