ApolloCon 2010: Fan flirting

I noticed ApolloCon Friday night panels have a certain rowdy tendency, if the fabulous "101 Uses For A Paperclip" from 3 years ago was any indication. It could be that a Friday night at a convention is some magic time when parties haven't started yet, and the people who would otherwise be partying go to less-than-seriously themed panels, bringing the atmosphere of mischief with them. This year's panel on flirting, "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation", confirmed the trend.

Every other SF convention I go to has a discussion on love or relationships (or their darker side, such as stalking) from fannish perspective. But unlike the earlier "Finding Love In Fandom", this was not a panel on romantic advice. This time "flirting" was just a shorthand for sultry stories from late nights at cons. I came away with an impression that I go to a very different types of conventions, as I've never witnessed anything like the situations talked about here.

K. Hutson Price, Kathy Thornton, and Cathey Osbourne in the "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

One panelist told about a party at Soonercon (which, she promised, had stories to beat any other convention stories), where there was a grope box, made out of PVC pipe structure with black tarp placed over it. There were holes cut out in it for people on the outside to grope people who were in the box. At one time, a "lovely young woman of a larger size" got into the box. Unfortunately, she wasn't getting any takers. The panelist felt sorry for the girl, and started asking her male friends to stick their hands into the box. One by one, they refused. An hour later, she found someone who agreed to stick his hand in, only to scream: "there's nobody in there!" Apparently the girl had left long ago. Our compassionate panelist, having missed her exit, was sitting there feeling sorry for the empty box all that time.

Then the panelists attempted to give advice on how to flirt at conventions. Cathey Osbourne suggested an original approach that wouldn't be likely to work anywhere but at a convention.

"Say you are into very specific things, for example, duct tape," she said. "Stand in the hallway and tear a piece of duct tape. It makes a very distinctive noise. See who turns around. That's your marker."

Teddy Harvia and K. Hutson Price in the "Con Season is in the Air: when a Young Fan's Mind Turns to Flirtation" panel. Find more pictures from ApolloCon 2010 in my photo gallery.

Finally, to end the post on a romantic note, here is a story told by Teddy Harvia.

"The best pickup line was used on me at Soonercon," said Teddy Harvia. "I was standing in a group of 8-10 people. An attractive woman looked at my badge, and said "I dreamt your name last night". And then 9 months later we got married."

Pictures from ApolloCon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

Tags: ApolloCon, authors, Cathey Osbourne, conventions, fandom, image, Soonercon, Teddy Harvia, writers

SXSW 2010: Online dating panel

In the "Seven Years in Online Dating" panel ("Since 2003, online dating has evolved in how web sites, profiles and photos are constructed to attract potential mates. Expectations and resultant relationships have changed as well. In this talk we illustrate how web site design and user savvy have created an alternate universe of intimate social protocols.", Twitter: #7yearsonlinedating), the audience participated in the discussion, setting the room abuzz with sex differences. Men and women have different expectations for dating-related online interaction. Women said they are most likely to respond to well-written emails, especially if the guy mentions, or responds to, to something interesting he saw in her profile. Guys, on the other hand, prefer to send short messages or "winks", and forego writing altogether. Being used to low rates of women's responses, they don't see a point in investing too much time in elaborate emails. (This looks like a vicious circle to me. If they wrote better messages, maybe women would respond more often?) It is also more common among guys to treat back-and-forth messaging as a chat, rather than exchange of letters. In that context, a short "hi, how are you" type of message is not "lazy", but merely an invitation to chat. But women more commonly expect every message to be a complete email.

The panelists and audience briefly touched on new kinds of online dating sites that have sprung up in the last few years. The most notable among them, Gelato, lets members integrate their social media feed -- Twitter, Facebook statuses, Netflix queue, favorite Youtube videos -- into their dating profile. The idea is that this gives other members a clearer idea of what kind of personality you truly are. If you say you love art movies, better make sure your Netflix queue reflects that. :-) (Gelato dating was one of the featured startups at Innotech 2009. I wrote about it in this blog post.)

Erhardt Graeff and Jonathan Beilin in the Seven Years in Online Dating panel. More pictures from SXSW 2010 are in my photo gallery.

Both the panelists and the audience were a bit skeptical how useful social media was in dating. Once people start uploading their entire life on the web, you may start feeling like you are dating a resume, not a person, said a guy in the audience. When you finally meet him or her, you may discover you liked their electronic version better. Erhardt Graeff, the panelist, admitted he broke up with a girl because she wasn't as interesting in real life as online.

Still, online dating isn't going to go away, and new iterations on the concept are always waiting in the wings. Somebody in the audience suggested that BuddyPress (web application from Wordpress that lets you build your own social network) will let everyone to create their own online dating site. I personally am not certain how much good it will do, because any online dating site is only successful once it reaches a critical mass of members. So your homespun dating site would only stand a chance if it could transparently interoperate with the giants, such as match.com or okcupid.com, making their member profiles available to your members. But the giants wouldn't want another site to siphon off their revenues, would they? Off the top of my head I can't think what business model would make such make such interoperation possible.

Innotech 2009

Still cursing Austin's prehistoric self-pay parking lots, I walked into the Innotech Beta Summit panel, a showcase of select Austin startups. To my surprise, parking meters were mentioned there. A representative of Infochimps, a company that specializes in "making large data sets sexy", said a collection of locations of parking spots in downtown Austin is an example of those sexy data sets. (Another example is TAKS scores.) Anyone can put a data set on Infochimps web site, and if some organization or person is interested in it, they can buy it. Well, I'm sure glad some company is interested in locations of parking meters in Austin downtown. Whatever they are up to might make parking easier one day, who knows?

Wouldn't it be nice to have an application that showed all parking spots within a certain radius? It could direct me to a nearest free spot as I wind my way through downtown, looking for parking. But maybe such an app for iPhone already exists? I don't have an iPhone (and now that I've been laid off I don't anticipate buying one soon), so I don't know.

I expected Beta Summit to be the most interesting Innotech panel, and it was. It featured 6 or 7 Austin startups. The first one, BuzzStream, did not impress me all that much, perhaps because I came to the talk late. The only impression I got from it was that it did some kind of fancy contact management, integrating your contacts with social management sites. Or perhaps it was yet another social media aggregator, the kind that gathers all the content your friends have posted on various other sites, into one news feed. We all have seen social media applications that claimed to be the aggregator to end all aggregators, and then a few months later no one remembers them. Plurk comes to mind.

The next presenter was Gendai Games. Their product lets you create an iPhone game in minutes, even if you are not a programmer. As a demo, Nestor Hernandez recreated the game Labyrinth in front of the audience. He did that he dragged widgets, such as Accelerate and Collide, on the screen. Those widgets made a ball accelerate when iPhone is tilted, or bounce off the "walls", i.e. the sides of the screen. Pretty neat.

Eric Moujaes from Gendai Games	Tristan Slominski speaking on Operational Transformation: The Key to Understanding Google Wave

One web application everybody could relate to was Gelato, a dating site that works differently than most dating sites. On an ordinary dating site members have static profiles that are often misleading or uninformative. People often post younger and thinner pictures of themselves. Steve Odom, the founder of Gelato, believes that people's social media data streams reveals much more about them than their self-proclaimed love of "long walks on the beach and candlelight dinners". Their Tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos or Netflix queues, or soundtracks on internet radio stations they listen to, reflect a much fuller, dynamic picture of their tastes and their preferred ways to spend time. So Gelato aggregates all that into a user's profile. Is that a bit too stalkerish? Users can opt out of whichever feeds they prefer others not to see.

As a demo, Steve Odom pulled up a woman's profile on Gelato. "Would I want to date her?" he asked the audience. Her Twitter word cloud (another neat feature of Gelato) showed that her most commonly used word was LOL. "Hmm, maybe not," Odom concluded.

Another web application of broad appeal was PetMD. It's analogous to medical information sites, only about pet health. It also helps you find a veterinarian, even an emergency vet if need be.

There may have been other startups, but I left early.

This conference was a mix of technical and soft presentations. It's always hard to know which ones to choose; an appealing tile can be misleading. So there was some kind of "work/life balance for entrepreneurs" panel, where a self-proclaimed work/life balance coach did nothing but slung cliches about success like "you are your own worst enemy"; I spent half an hour before concluding it was BS. But by then I missed the first half of "Operational Transformation: The Key to Understanding Google Wave" presentation by Tristan Slominski. When I came in, he and the audience were up to their eyeballs in the APIs. Operational Transformation is kind of like a platform on which Google Wave is written. Knowing its API, you can write your own clients that will be able to communicate with other Operational Transform clients. For example, Slominski says, those could be plug-ins for IDEs (i.e. development environments -- tools in which programmers write, compile, build and test their code.