I didn’t attend any sessions today due to client meetings. But last night the conversation on everyone’s lips was the quality (or lack thereof) of yesterdays keynote. After the 2007 launch of Twitter at SxSW, Evan Williams was back again to launch their new @Anywhere pages. After Ev had made his announcement, he was interviewed on stage by Umair Haque, a writer and consultant for the Harvard Business Review. After hearing these rumors I went online to see for myself. The session appeared to be rife with audio problems and about halfway through Ev started to look quite uncomfortable with the interview. Ironically on his very own service the disappointed audience members were stating their feelings about the caliber of the interview. The general consensus was that attendees would have rather seen the Twitter guru give a speech and that Umair appeared to be interviewing himself on stage. And so the people have spoken on the open platform Evan and his team created. Maybe the openness of Twitter does have some downfalls.

That evening it was time for the battles to commence. This year the burning trend in the interactive world is without question Location Services. The two lead contenders appear to be foursquare and Gowalla. Both companies won awards at this year’s 13th Annual SxSW Web awards for their work, but early reports state that foursquare appears to be the “defacto” service. My questions are around how and when these types of services will become everyday practice in the b2b world, but I am quite sure this will have come full circle before SxSW 2011. The fun continued in the foursquare versus Gowalla arena as both companies where holding their parties on the same night. Last night in fact. Where do my loyalties lie I hear you cry? Not to sit on the fence, but I went to the Gowalla party, but have foursquare app firmly planted on my phone.

I also popped into the Microsoft Party at Speakeasy and Rackspace at Maggie Mae’s. Good times.