ReadWriteWeb

If I were truly mischief and wanted to game the system, I would have named this article, "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login, Part 2." If you're not familiar with the incident to which I'm referring: One of the most illustrative cases of the incomplete state of the Internet as an information system was in February 2010, when ReadWriteWeb itself happened to publish an article with "Facebook" and "login" in its headline. It soon found itself at or near the top of Google search results for the phrase "facebook login," with the result being that hundreds of Web users to this day happen upon this page when they're trying to reach Facebook itself.

The Web was not designed to require identity or authentication for data to be accessed. Up to now, most consumers have not considered this a problem - at least, not the ones who found themselves staring at ReadWriteWeb when they were expecting Farmville. This will change.

At last week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, 32 companies presented at the SXSW Accelerator awards, sponsored by Microsoft's BizSpark. The companies spoke in front of a panel of judges, one of which was ReadWriteWeb's editor, Richard MacManus, who helped in judging the news applications. By day two, 32 finalists were narrowed down to just 12, all competing for the top spot in one of four categories: news related technologies, innovative Web technologies, entertainment technologies and social media and social networking technologies.

So, who won?

In part one of our video series from SXSW we posted our interviews with Oren Michaels of Mashery and Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent. In part two, we have three interviews to show you.

John Musser of Programmable Web discusses how APIs are helping solve the issues that come with a fragmented device market. Sam Ramji of Apigee discusses how programming is coming to everything from weight scales to tractors. And Matt Galligan of SimpleGeo discusses the issue of dominance in the API space by companies such as Google and Facebook.

Spiceworks CEO Scott Abel sat next to me at dinner last Saturday night during SXSW. We were at Porter Finn, a restaurant in the Hilton, right in the center of the action for the annual event in Austin.

Our conversation turned to Steve Jobs. Abel worked at NeXT Software under Jobs and during his time there, Jobs shared his belief that "Good is the enemy of great." Jobs meant that true greatness is hard to achieve because good enough is usually what people are satisfied in producing. Achieving greatness takes far more time to accomplish. But are those who are "great" the only people who influence others?

SXSW is an event for influencers. Startups compete for everyone's attention. People are in a constant state of movement, trying applications, monitoring the conversation and adding their own insights as they listen to their colleagues in the panels and at the parties.

If 2010 was the year of location-based services, then 2011 is certainly the year of group messaging. With a slew of new group messaging apps dominating this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the big questions have been why now and why not Facebook or Twitter?

The answer, it seems, could be very simple. Group messaging apps do something that sites like Facebook and Twitter don't - they take away the magic and the guesswork and provide a blunt instrument for communicating with small groups of people using both data and text messaging.

Here is the first of a two-part series about the rise of APIs at SXSW this year. It consists of five interviews: Oren Michels of Mashery, Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent, John Musser of Programmable Web, Sam Ramji of Apigee and Matt Galligan, chief strategy officer at SimpleGeo.

I fashioned a new video tool with an old fishing rod for the interviews. It helps extend the camera and keeps it steady. I used my bike pant ties to attach the camera to the pole. It gets attention as you will see in the interview with Oren.

It's easy to be dismissive about something like Startup Bus, where teams of hackers build and launch their projects over the course of the bus ride to South by Southwest. There's only so much you can do, of course, in such a short period of time, thrown together with strangers and with limited resources. Add to it, in this case, you're then thrown, if you will, into the din and the buzz of SXSW where it's next to impossible to get your startup seen or heard.

But the group that came together to form Lemonade Stand have lived to tell the tale. After five days building their product as their bus made their way from New York to Austin, the group has a working prototype, an app in the Android Store, an API with outside developers, and interest from potential investors. That's a fairly big win.

Later this week, the madness known as South by Southwest kicks off when thousands of developers, bloggers, social media gurus, founders, venture capitalists and generally geeky folks descend upon Austin, Texas. The nearly week long event, also known as "Spring Break for Geeks" or simply "South by", is a seething mass of parties, panels and folks trying to walk while staring at their smartphones and there are a handful of new apps that could make it that much better.

Each of these five apps helps with a distinctive part of SXSW and we think that showing up without them could seriously hinder your ability to work, party, get interested and have fun. These are the apps we're going to use to rock SXSW and you should too.

The anticipation in the tech world is palpable, as SXSW Interactive kicks off at the end of the week. We expect to see lots of startups launch over the course of the event, and LaunchRock, the creator of viral launch pages for startups is putting the pieces in place to make its own, newly launched service even more useful.

We covered LaunchRock here last month, following the startup's creation over Philly Startup Weekend. LaunchRock makes it incredibly simple to get interested users signed up for your startup service or product, pre-launch. LaunchRock has added more features, including an embeddable widget and an API so that you can integrate the service into your current sign-up process.

Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That's what Lokast, the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.