To answer your question why would he be at SxSW?

Because he is a 23 year old geek worth over one billion dollars on paper. SxSW was best described to me as spring break for geeks. And geeks love nothing more than a fellow geek who has hit the big time.

They even love to hate him, insisting they can write better code and if he is worth a billion then they must be worth a zillion.

Did you notice all the camera flashes at the start of the keynote?

It easily surpassed any retiring sports hero press conference, and probably equaled what you would see at a major peace treaty signing. Although we haven’t had any of those in quite some time so my memory may be off.

It certainly far surpassed the flashing at Elliot Spitzer’s fiasco press conference.

Oh and another thing, the VC’s that go to SxSW love geeks like Zuckerberg too. At least that is they love the dollars he represents.

Put those two crowds together and Zuckerberg was the perfect keynoter. In fact he gave the perfect disastrous keynote that gave all the geeks something to tweet and blog about for a week.

Maybe it’s different here in Chicago. Maybe not. I ignore requests for hugs, the Oregon Trail, and haven’t found anyone to play Scrabulous with.

I’m connected to Facebook through people I network with in person. So I get updates about local events, local causes, and things that local people are doing.

Since my “thing” is networking I find that knowing who is doing what where is pretty important to me.

I follow where Tech Cocktail is happening next, and hope that soon someone will put a Twitter Meetup event page up so I can figure out where the cool kids are meeting downtown.

(And lamer than the Be Janes? I’m totally blown away.)

Erin, the Queen of Spain criticizes the folks at SXSW for not grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that his application sucks. And won’t show women breastfeeding their kids….

The best use I found for the Face was to be friends with my 16yo daughter so I could keep an eye on her and her friends - but now she’s even bored with it and has deleted her account. Doh!

I wonder if Zucker’s big mistake was to assume that all those net-addicted tweens and social phobes who are loving Facebook are the kinds of people who’d turn up and see him speak. Like in *person*.

Also - I miss bowling.