SXSW as told by posts on Secret

If you aren’t one of the lucky ones who is going on your company’s dime to learn about disruptive tech party in Austin this week, don’t let the SXSW FOMO get you down. If you’re in need of a break from the endless flow of #sxsw tweets clogging your feed, you can experience South by Southwest as it really is through the lens of Secret.

Secret, the app everyone in Silicon Valley was buzzing about early last month, lets users post and read anonymous secrets from the network of people in your contacts. Secrets that get more buzz and attention end up being shared more widely across the app’s network. As made perfectly clear in Sam Biddle’s post on Valleywag, which features screengrabs of some of the more entertaining secrets that popped up in his Secret feed, Secret has quickly become a hotbed of Silicon Valley gossip and trash talking. 

However, Secret is hoping to make the app go beyond the Valley’s echo chamber to reach a more mainstream crowd. That’s why Secret co-founder and CEO David Byttow spoke at SXSW this past Saturday and announced two new features that aim to make Secret more widely appealing and shareable: “nearby” and “share.”

Nearby, as the name suggests, lets Secret users not only see anonymized secrets from people in their extended networks but will also allow users to see secrets from those physically close to them. The share feature enables users to easily post secrets they like to Twitter or Facebook. And for a limited time, there is a special SXSW Secrets page where attendees can share what they are actually doing and thinking about at SXSW. You don’t need the app to see these secrets; the page is viewable to anyone on the Web.

With that in mind — and a huge grain of salt thrown in for good measure — here’s a look at what it’s “really” like at SXSW. According to Secret anyway:

It’s all about who you know:

SXSW can be emotional and you will feel #foreveralone … :

… Unless, that is, you’re there to hook up — whether you’re married or not:

Some people really need to lower their expectations about the whole shebang, though: