The discussions at SXSW are more about data this year than in years past. Social is a topic of discussion but the influencers are now putting more attention on the data layers built on top of applications and the new ways to identify and manage the flow of “social objects” from apps and social networks.  Scaling and automation are what’s in vogue. Social media, per se, is not.

In 2006, the talk was about blogging. Podcasting became a catalyst for a new generation of services that were best realized with such new devices as the iPod. Twitter came onto the scene in 2007.  In 2008, Mark Zuckeberg came to SXSW and told Sarah Lacey that Facebook would expand internationally. He talked about how they try to help people communicate more efficiently. We have since learned about the deep impact that has had on how we define privacy.

In each of those years, the new technologies faced a resulting backlash. People critiqued blogging and podcasting, calling it trivial. In 2007, people asked “why would I care what you are doing now?” In 2008, a deep frustration began to surface about how Facebook treated privacy.

But what has happened in subsequent years? Blogging has lived and has become an important medium for journalists and has served as the foundation for new types of services such as Twitter, Tumblr and Posterous. Both Twitter and Facebook gained worldwide acceptance for their pioneering use of activity stream technology. Activity streams have come to be a defining feature set of the modern application.

This year, big data may not be the most talked about of subjects but it’s without doubt shifting the conversation.

Some observations:

Ambient Apps: The ability to automate tasks that give you cues about where you are going and what you plan to do. Apps people mention include Highlight, Forecast and Geoloqi.

Scaling and Automation: With big data comes the need for automation. A startup subculture is emerging in this space with companies offering new ways to gather data and tools to make sense of it. There is still a huge gap. Companies like Infochimps are filling in that gap with the systems they have developed internally and now offer to customers.

Not Social – Social Objects: The infrastructure that gives the ability to share a message is well defined. Now it is more about the data in the social objects we share. I saw a demo from Bottlenose that showed how metadata can be attached to a data stream. To do this they had to create their own natural language processing. Traditional natural language processing is document based. In this new environment, a support infrastructure can be defined by the rules associated with the social objects in the data stream.

Connected Systems: This themes relates directly to scaling and automation. There will be 20 billion connected devices by 2020. These nodes connect to thousands of services. How do companies keep track of the services that are running across these nodes? They will increasingly use services such as Cloudability, which keeps track of the services you use.

Services Angle

The API continues to show its incredible significance in the evolution of the social Web at SXSW over the past six years. It has emerged as a data and a commercial gateway. The smart services providers have leveraged APIs to fulfill their services. Tripit now has more than 2,000 developers. Concur, an enterprise expense management software company, acquired Tripit last year.  That was a smart move. Tripit continues to innovate by leveraging multiple services. In the process, Concur has come to understand the requirements for scaling a Web organization.

I use APIs as an example as I think you can map their development to this new shift we are seeing at SXSW. The new step forward is in figuring out how to create information architectures that generate unrealized value. APIs connect services. Underneath those connected services are new infrastructures that are powering new types of services that feed on scaling data.

Druhv Bansal is the co-founder at Infochimps. In an interview today he talked about data in the context of feedback loops. In today’s world, Anne Hathaway affects the stock performance of Warren Buffet’s company: Berkshire Hathaway. It appears that when Hathaway is in the news for a new film, the social data gets bound in to the tight feedback loops of the financial services market. That’s an error but it shows the power that this data possesses. Google, Apple and Amazon have historically controlled the data on the Internet but the feedback loops are now opening up. The rest of us are now catching up. The data has been unleashed and tools like Hadoop are giving us new glimpses into the types of feedback loops we can create. There is still a huge gap that needs to be filled.  At SXSW this year, we are just starting to see how this big data will be harnessed. The age of social media has matured. The new talk is about the data.