Every year, just before South by Southwest Interactive starts, the froth starts churning. Everybody begins wondering what this year’s breakout hit app will be.
This trend really started after both Twitter and foursquare blew up there. In subsequent years, there have been a couple of other notable success stories (GroupMe, Kik, Beluga) as well as some that seem, well, overly hyped (hello, Highlight and Lanyrd).
The true breakout apps of SXSW — the ones that went on to be the kinds of things used not just by tech-industry nerds, but all sorts of reasonable people — broke out because they helped attendees negotiate SXSW. Twitter helped people find out what was going on. Foursquare helped them find each other. GroupMe and other messaging apps helped small groups of people talk to each other on an ad hoc backchannel. All of these things had pretty obvious use cases at a large conference. And of course, all of them had widely applicable real world uses. SXSW was just the test bed.
But as a result, everyone now looks for that Big Thing at SXSW. The last major ones were Highlight, which didn't exactly break, and… what? What was the breakout app of 2013? The basic consensus was that there wasn't one. And maybe that will be the new normal. Because when things were really blowing up, mobile was just getting off the ground. We were working it out. In March of 2007, there was no iPhone, to say nothing of apps for it.
So what’s the new thing this year? Maybe there won’t be a thing. Maybe the things that made us look for things were anomalies, or symptoms of an emerging market.
Yes, Twitter hit it big at SXSW. But one would have to be a fool to attribute Twitter’s long-term worldwide success to a brief moment of popularity in Texas. SXSW was a transmission point, not a key ingredient. It’s also worth recalling that just months prior at Macworld Expo in January of that year, people were talking about Twitter having a breakout moment then and there too.
The same goes for Foursquare — although it did have a much more deliberate SXSW marketing strategy. In the weeks before the show, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley (a genuinely nice guy and everyone's pal) was getting the media and tech’s big names on board, so they'd all be using it there. It took off because Crowley (whose previous effort at location sharing, Dodgeball, also took off at SXSW in 2006) was smart about getting it in the right hands at the right time. They even created badges and mayorships just for the conference, intending them to be a short-term feature, but the idea stuck.
And what also stuck was that that South by Southwest can create a breakout app. That it can make something hit. That’s just not true.
To a large extent, Twitter and Foursquare are more responsible for SXSW Interactive’s mainstream popularity than SXSW is for theirs. Although it was already big by 2007, Twitter and Foursquare tipped it into an entirely other kind of show. Interactive was once a side show, now it’s a main event.
That mirrors what’s happened to the industry as a whole with the transition to mobile. It’s much, much harder to have a breakout hit now — at least one that remains popular — than it was a few years ago. The era of the breakout app that gets big suddenly, grows to massive scale and (this is the important part) stays that way may be over, or at least ending. Do you really need something new that you don’t already have to survive and navigate South by Southwest? Or even society?
And the things that do hit often seem more likely to be fads — things we all enjoy and chew on for a bit with our ever shrinking attention spans before moving to the next morsel. Take games. Remember Dots? What about Letterpress? Candy Crush? Not that the aforementioned ones aren’t all still popular. They are. But none is the "it" game anymore. That might be unfair, because games have a kind of built-in end case. You typically beat them or tire of them. You move on. And it makes sense that that kind of behavior will happen with other kinds of apps as well.
Apps are increasingly about shared cultural experiences set against the times that we live in. Right now the hot-shit app trend is anonymity. Whisper, Secret, Confide, Wut, and Banter are all having moments. Given the revelations that our government is peeking into our phones, or the high profile outings of celebrity bad behavior based on the things they've done with their phones, that makes sense. But it also makes sense that before long, as culture shifts, we'll all shift over to the next hot category.
And that's the thing. South by Southwest Interactive is a reflection of the industry, not its driver. And the industry trend right now is lots of niche solutions filling in lots of little holes. The big transformations on mobile are going to be fewer and farther between. Which means having a big breakout hit that starts there, and takes over the world, is going to be harder every year.
