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SXSW: Twitter’s @anywhere, Digg’s Redesign and StickyBits

As smelly tour vans with bald tires wobble into Austin for the music leg of SXSW, still kicking around on my dashboard are the twitpics, 140 character pull quotes and notes gathered from four days of interactive sessions.

Two big news announcements at SXSW Interactive 2010 centered around enabling more easily distributed and personalized real-time information.

At the second annual Bigg Digg Shindig, CEO Jay Adelson announced that Digg is redesigning the site, increasing site speed and incorporating customizable features, including access to personal feeds from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID.

Update: Bill Shupp, a Digg PHP developer, posted more info on Digg’s blog noting that a survey of users showed that the top four popular services are “Google (87.9%), Facebook (75.5%), Yahoo! (51.9%), and Twitter (51.1%),” metrics that drove the new unified platforms login.

No firm date for a roll-out, but prior to a site relaunch in “a few months,” Digg is offering a beta signup, in addition to a sneak peek of the unified login (below):

Later in the week, a Twitter keynote made it crystal clear that major sites will be melding users’ personal activity streams with native site content.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced that Twitter is releasing its information stream across the web with a new open API dubbed @anywhere.

Crowds spilled into hallways and side conference rooms to listen to Twitter’s announcement. Many anticipated news around a Twitter advertising model. Yet due to overly polite moderator Umair Haque and a tight-lipped guest the event was roundly criticized for being too vague. Update: Haque has responded to the criticism on the Harvard Business Review blog. (Happy to fill the void was the Twitter back channel with nonstop quips about @nowhere, @everywhere and @somewhere.)

Twitter did name @anywhere partners. Digg is one of 13 early participants — along with New York Times, Huffington Post, eBay, Yahoo! and Salesforce. In addition to infusing sites with dynamism, freshness and relevance, the new ‘insta-tweetstream’ will necessarily drive more innovation around targeted real-time advertising.

More info about @anywhere is expected to follow at Chirp, Twitter’s inaugural developer conference in mid-April.

If there was a new darling of the interactive festival it was StickyBits. The fuschia and orange sticker pack filled with barcodes and goofy avatars came tucked inside every attendee’s SXSWi swag bag. There is not a hot tip in the world that spreads quite as quickly among conventioneers as where to find cool, free [stuff].

Developed by Splurb’s Billy Chasen, Stickybits uses mobile apps (iPhone and Android, as of this writing) and adhesive bar codes to disseminate digital media (videos, photos, resumes) to physical locations. Scan a barcode, attach a digital file, stick the loaded bar code somewhere good and track your bar code’s activity online.

The NSFW potential in public bathrooms makes the head spin. Still, Stickybits is further proof that adorable + innovative + free = BUZZ WIN.

— Sheigh (@sheigh)

Tags: twitter, digg, android, splurb, realtime, iphone, stickybits, swswi, kevin rose, billy chasen, @ev, umair haque, bill shupp, jay adelson, evan williams, @anywhere,