The Web 2.0 Expo and the Undocumented Benefits Of Premature Infatuation

Note: some links and embeds contain strong language.

So the Web 2.0 expo is in town here at the Javits Center in NYC. That means a year ago today is the first time I met (read: observed from a distance) the guy who is now my boss, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Cut to 11 A.M. the day of, my boy Ricky and I realized we had uh, neglected to purchase passes to the event. So naturally, Ricky engaged some guy with tech-speak who then started knee-jerk pitching him some nonsense about a portalized hub for something-or-other. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the guy, I was surreptitiously snapping iPhone photos of the access badge dangling from the guy’s neck.

40 minutes later we were back huddled around the conference room table of FanDome’s midtown offices, meticulously gluing together and furiously spray painting the raw materials we had bought from Home Depot to duplicate the badge from our high resolution photograph. It took forever to get them right, but we finally did, victoriously hailed a cab back to the Javits Center and got past security without so much as the suspicious upcurl of a lip. Great Success!

We got in, met up with @stephbags (also now a VM employee!) and headed over to the area where the keynote speeches were starting. We got in just in time, and filed in to three empty seats at the very last row of the massive lecture hall.

Now to this point, all the experience I’d had with technical seminars had been of the mind-numbing variety. Picture yourself shifting uncomfortably in a wooden chair while witnessing a live reading for the books on tape of a technical manual. Not to mention, this books-on-tape was courteously narrated by some foreign-ish guy who, how can I put this delicately, could have used a couple semesters at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too

So you can imagine my surprise when this happened:

If you haven’t seen Gary’s keynote at web 2.0, just stop reading this post, stop all the other crap you’re doing and watch the whole thing from start to finish. There is NO better use for 14 minutes of your day today. Errr, 14 minutes in front of your computer at work that is

You done? I’ll wait. You sure? OK, now, if you were there you know that the entire performance from start to finish just blew you off your feet. It was the purest form of that feeling I just WISH, so bad, that I could bottle up and share with all of you. The feeling where you feel like you can reach out and touch the future. And let me tell you, that future is just unbelievably soft and velvety and luxuriant, like bags of sand.

I know a lot of people, especially those in the non-tech space, saw that keynote, were mildly impressed and just went about their day. I, on the other hand, was immediately and irrevocably obsessed. Combine Gary’s fundamental uplifting message with his impeccable stage presence (which is something I can appreciate the challenges of) and I was hooked.

A few days later, I was using ‘the twitter’ regularly (again, premature infatuation), and it wasn’t long before Gary sent out a tweet looking for people with sports sites, which prompted this tweet.

Nothing came of the initial e-mail contact I had with Gary and AJ then, but if it wasn’t for that early adopter action, Gary would have no idea who I was when we met in person at the NYC Digg Swigg in April. If Gary had no idea who I was then, then the conversation that we accidentally struck up with @drzhang who was serendipitously seated next to us at the NYC Blogs with Balls conference never would have led to us arranging a meeting with Gary and AJ at the then nascent Vaynermedia offices in Hell’s Kitchen, and I would never be working at my dream job today.

Now, this story is one championing the open-mindedness it takes to be an early adopter, but the reality is that early adoption can be a double edged sword, and there exists a real dichotomy here in the web world.

How it was for me a year ago at the web 2.0 expo is how it is at its best: the community is a vibrant, exhilarating, and addictive blend of early adopters, all united with the vision of bringing the future to the masses. But at its worst the web-building community is like a support group for sufferers of acute premature infatuation — a group that enables its own destructive tendencies by building elaborately designed skyscrapers that nobody asked for on top of cities that are only accessible by an underground tunnel that only people who know what an RSS feed and are using a bleeding edge version of Firefox can enter.

This premise of early adoption versus premature infatuation, and the dangers of disconnecting yourself from the grounding influence of the brick and mortar world around you is going to be the basis of my blog post next Wednesday, tentatively titled “I’m so ronery (why is everybody so fah*ing stupid)”.

Catch you guys next Wednesday!