SXSW Interactive/Film Day Two: Say Goodbye to E-mail, Commercials and Multiple Logins

Today’s panels looked into the future and found that a lot of what we take for granted may have a shorter life span than we initially thought.

Long Talks on the Short Form had a lot of the usual to say about user-generated content. “We all love it, and here are a bunch of places you can show it.” When the conversation turned to making money off of it, though, it became clear that (a) the business models are not uniform and (b) that may not be the point anyway. The ease of video creation has led to a new class of filmmaker who can afford to make movies for the sake of making movies, not as a calling card for future success. So, making a short film can now be as reflexive a form of expression as blogging or needlepoint.

That and according to Evan Fleischer, VP of alternative and co-branded programming for the Independent Film Channel, the 30 second spot is on its way out. To be replaced by? Well, some sort of revenue generated from ads in and around online video to be sure, and possibly the hosting of user-generated video on corporate sites, but beyond that is anyone’s guess. In a sense, user-generated ads (probably not unlike the ones you may have seen during the Super Bowl) may point the way.

A panel on e-mail etiquette ironically touched upon its own impending obsolescence by suggesting that e-mail is on its way out, too, likely to be replaced by more social network-friendly tools like text messaging, IM and sites like Twitter that converge the two. (Twitter, by the way, is the talk of the conference. More on that in another post.) In the office, however, e-mail is probably here to stay and while it is the authors of the upcoming book SEND recommend that you don’t (a) cc someone’s boss when you want them to do something, (b) use language that is too casual or (c) assume that someone will get that you’re being sarcastic, because most of the time, they won’t. In the meantime, the relatively new field of “interruption science” suggests that you’ll get a lot more done if you turn off your send/receive notices. Just check the mail when you’re ready.

You can share your own e-mail horror stories at www.thinkbeforeyousend.com

Finally, if the panel on How to Get Your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture is any indication, within a year you’ll be able to have one login for all Web sites, and it will probably come from AOL. The panelists were AOL employees working against the bloated lethargic tendencies that plague any large corporation, in this case their own, to pursue more agile strategies. In this case that means combining different pieces of software and platforms the same way Dangermouse mixed Jay-Z with the White Album to create not only a universal ID but trendy sites like ficlets that mashes up Flickr, Creative Commons and AOL to tell really cool stories about really cool photos.

Oh, and Robert Rodriguez is using high tech to make Grindhouse look extremely low tech. He showed a little bit of the film today, and it looks gorious.