20) Chase and Status – No More Idols

The main reason is primarily because of this song. By far one of my favourite songs ever. The rest of the album unfortunately isn’t as good as the previous album.

19) Real Estate – Days

Quite a surprise this. Very listenable album!

18) TV On the Radio – Nine Types of Light

I really like TV on The Radio… if I am in a specific mood. This is a great album, but it didn’t hook as much as Dear Science did.

17) Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX – We’re new here

What a great mashup album. Jamie XX (of well.. the xx) remixed Gil Scott-Heron. Random cover-art, but a great album. RIP Gil.

16) The Naked and Famous – Passive me, Agressive you

After hearing Young Blood, I didn’t expect the rest of the album to so great. Young Blood itself is such a great track. Something about it puts a lot of our generation into a song.

15) Radiohead – King of Limbs

Every Radiohead is hotly anticipated. King of Limbs as well. You kind of expect Thom Yorke and co to bust something amazing. In Radiohead’s standards, meh. In general, great album. And how can you not like Thom’s dancing in Lotus Flower?

14) Neon Indian – Era Extrana

His debut album was a pioneering album in chillwave, although at times it felt purposely so. Drenched in 80′s synth-lo-fi-ness. With Era Extrana, it feels like he has kind of grown up and took a new approach, one that doesn’t quite try to be more than it is.

13) Jamie Woon – Mirrorwriting

This is probably the closest I’ve come to liking R&B, but this is probably because he lent some cues from dubstep (or post-dubstep as it is called these days). Spirits is such an uplifting song. He usually does the whole song by sampling his voice. Check it out.

12) Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

I was wonder how they could top their debut album. They did, and they did it so well. Their music always has a way to transport you to snowy cabins somewhere in Canada. And their lyrics are always thought-provoking.

11) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – The Social Network

What a great soundtrack. Just listen.

10) James Blake – James Blake

Probably the most inventive album for me of the year. Minimalist and deep. He has such a great voice, with the mix of almost soulful-dubstep.

9) The Black Keys – El Camino

Wow. What a groovey album. I wasn’t a fan of Brothers (gasp!). But this is so great. Just watch this guy dance, then you will know why.

8 ) Mutemath – Odd Soul

You could say Mutemath ventured into Black Keys territory in this album. They did. In fact El Camino and Odd Soul are very similar. It’s a change from their more electronic influenced sound.

7) Gotye – Making Mirrors

This album came out of nowhere as I was perusing reddit. A mixed-bag of songs, but each one unique and exciting. The strange contrast between Wide Eyes Open and then moving into I Feel Better. I was wondering if there having a laugh. And this is what makes it great. This guy has an amazing voice. His music videos are worth watching on their own as well.

6) Crystal Fighters – Star of Love

Created by using basque influences, these guys produced such an interesting sound by infusing it with electronic elements.

5) Foster the People – Torches

This album also came out of nowhere. After hearing Pumped Up Kicks, which I still feel is kinda boring bubblegum pop, my friend was raving about them. Got the rest of the album and was hooked. So listenable and such great hooks!

4) Nero – Welcome Reality

Epic. These guys make epic music. Their music videos however are… odd. Don’t know if they purposely did not try for some more production value. Never the less, a great dnb/dubstep album. Massive sound.

3) Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed

Didn’t expect this here, did you? Their original album was great (with some dud songs), but this remix album turned all the songs into gold. There are few albums where I like every song and play it through from start to finish. The more I listened, the great it became.

2) M83 – Hurry Up We’re Dreaming

When I heard M83 were releasing a new album, I thought I would eventually get it, considering I enjoyed his previous albums. Although, a lot of his electronic-shoegaze gets too much after a while, so I skipped. Then I heard Midnight City and was amazed. Taking some cues from 80′s vibes, this album is just spectacular. It blows it out of the water. I fell in love with the slap bass in Claudia Lewis, and tripped along in Raconte-Moi un Historie.

1) White Lies – Ritual

I’m a sucker for White Lies. Their second album cemented this. I rarely listen to music based only on lyrical content (because usually I suck at hearing what people sing). With White Lies however, I just enjoy so much singing along to the songs. This music video is random.

Honorable Mention:

Isochronous – Inscapes.

I would’ve loved to include them in this list. They are a top-class act heralding from South Africa. The only problem is, is that I haven’t listend much to the album. It is not that I don’t like it (in fact I am glad the production level has been stepped up!). Without sounding hipster, I’ve been listening to the songs from this album since I first saw them live in 2009. I am eagerly awaiting new sounds!

There you have it! My favourite music of 2011!

As per usual, when I start a new app/web idea I try do it in a new language, with new architecture, whatever. Just something new I can learn. So, I opted to learn how Heroku works as well Amazon’s S3 for serving static files. It was quite a learning experience, learning how to set up virtual environments for Python and getting Heroku to work together.

So, what’s new? Feature-wise. Nothing new. But I have coded in such a way to easily add new features. I am probably going to add a once-off premium service in the feature that will enable users to download their tweets, read @mentions and read hashtags. When that will, I don’t know. Architecture-wise, it is running on Heroku and serving static files from S3. Will see how it pans out. I still have no clue how to determine when to scale to more dynos. Apparently one dyno can handle between 10-50 requests a second, which amount at 10 requests a second to about 864 000 requests a day. So far I’m well within that range.

Heroku offers 750 free hours, which if I am thinking about this correctly, amounts to 31 days of constant requests (at 1 request per second). That amounts to +- 2.6 million requests per month. My calculations might be wrong. If I am, please correct me. I’ve tried googling for these stats, but haven’t found any. As for S3, it should basically be free.

So currently, I’m running it all for free. Which is awesome! Lastly, I have set up opt-out following of @twimemachine. I get around 300-600 uniques a day. So hopefully I can build some traction from that into my Twitter account. Currently, nothing on TwimeMachine has any traction. There are no network effects or anything being stored (atm), so I’m relying on that to build up some value.

So, go to TwimeMachine and have fun reading your old tweets. And remember, it is not cool to live in your past.

If there are any errors, do let me know.

Cheers!

A new post of mine is up on Bandwidthblog, in which I talk about Facebook and Spotify. Gist: They are on the right track. What I’ve found with automatic sharing with Tweekly.fm is very much in line with what will make Facebook and Spotify a success. Go read it to see why.

A music video!

I made this a while ago in July, but never managed to share it. It’s for one of my songs, called Move Along.

It was shot with my HTC. It will be title track of a new EP I am working on (will include vocals). The intention of the EP will be to fund myself an iPad 2, so I can start jamming some live gigs with it connected to my Mac to Ableton. I’ve always wanted to do a gig, but I found it incredibly boring and not worth anyone’s time to just stand and press play. Ableton connected to a midi-controller will add some live elements to it. Look at TouchAble. Here is an example:

Awesome! Here is a snippet of another song that will be on it.

Some gazey WIP by Simon Segfault

Finally, I’ve started playing around with Node.js again. Expect a real-time music related application soon. Quite excited about this. I have no idea how it will turn, but I guess that’s what makes it exciting as well.

And finally. Keep listening!

——–

P.S. On non-music related note. TwimeMachine is now officially up for sale. Contact me if you are interested.

I joined github!

I’ve been following some projects (making little changes here and there). I’ve also uploaded SimpleRest, a simple JSON based PHP REST server. It’s not much, but it shows the flow when REST is used. I will probably add more to it in the future and probably make a blogpost about it. I like github. It really sparked my interest in open source. It is so easy to edit, commit and send a pull request to small open source projects. Someone cloned my small project and it is exciting to think people are using my code (even if they are just looking at it and think that it sucks). Expect more open source stuff from me in the future.

I wrote a blogpost on bandwidthblog, detailing OS X Lion’s interface and spitballing why Apple chose to make it look more like iOS. I also wrote a post on the MIH Medialab blog on the power of APIs.

For Cape Town’s creative week, there was a competition to  create an electronic remix of Cape Jazz (or Ghoema). I made a fun, upbeat groovy kwaito version. Go look on my soundcloud and dance with. The winners still has to be announced.

I recently updated my linkedin profile that has been stagnating. Add me on there.

In TwimeMachine news, it has been doing surprisingly well! It is now almost netting 150 000 pageviews a month! The ad revenue is rather good as well. Speculations on the rise in ad revenue is probably due to the site breaking often. The code is horrible and I haven’t had time to fix it up properly. In times of peak traffic, it kind of breaks. I’ve been looking at options to speed up development of TwimeMachine (un-breaking it, adding features, etc), one of them which includes selling it. If someone wants to take over the reigns and push it further, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Tweekly.fm is also continuing as usual, netting a few thousand users each month. Exciting things are happening. Stay tuned!

Should I use Google+?

I really believe the system is flawed. Go read and see why.

Should Wikipedia’s Search be improved?

This is a response to Greplin’s challenge to improve Wikipedia’s search.

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Apart from that. I am busy developing my API at the MIH Medialab. Thoroughly enjoying the environment and I’m spending most of my coding time now on completing a prototype!

“We can help to create ecosystems the same way that the Facebook and the Twitter APIs have created entire ecosystems of tools and products and experiences that are deeply integrated. Every municipal government and different types of public services has the same potential, which is that you can open up — through an API — the information and services that the city provides. Then you can allow everyone to engage with the city on their own terms.”

This is quite exciting! Being somewhat of a technotarian, it will be really interesting to see what becomes of this. I hope interesting mashups will rise up to better the life of a New Yorker (and hopefully set the trend for other cities and countries).

Omnomnomnom

Did I expect the soup to turn a congealed wheat? Not at first of course. With my young mind, I knew I liked bread. I liked soup. I liked bread and soup and stuffed some more bread into the soup. That’s how I am starting to feel about Facebook. I keep adding friends; friends keep adding me. And it is starting to fill up, becoming noisy and bloated. Why is that happening? Dunbar’s Number, my friend. Dunbar’s Number.

Robin Dunbar's book. Read it.

Dunbar’s number (proposed by Robin Dunbar) is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. What is that number? 150. It has surprisingly shown up in a lot of real-world examples (from nomadic tribes to modern day factory floors). I was wondering if this would apply to online-relationships. Considering that Facebook is about ‘connecting with people you care about’, the data reveals a surprisingly similar trend. Facebook’s stats show that the average amount of Facebook friends are… drum roooll. 130.

Now, I’ve spoken about this in the past. Today, it is becoming more apparent as Facebook’s active users in the USA has dwindled by 6 million users. Maybe it is just a seasonal trend, a momentary dip, or maybe it is indicative of a greater problem? Facebook doesn’t know what to do about this increasing bloat.

People change. You aren’t that great of friends with some of your highschool buddies. You are however, adding more and more people on Facebook, without actually dumping some of them off. Facebook has only been around for the majority of its users for 2-3 years.

Now move forward a few years, and people will have changed. They will have new people who are more important in their lives. This means, Facebook’s average friends count will keep growing.

How has Facebook battled with this? They have recently (and silently) slipped in controls for the news feed that show only people you most interact with. The odd thing is, it doesn’t run across all devices that way! If you have Facebook for Android, you will notice a lot more updates that doesn’t appear in your web feed (m.facebook.com is the same as the web feed). Does it work. Not really. It sucks in a certain way to determine what I deem important. Just because I don’t interact much with a person/band, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in my feed.

So. What now?

Good question. One which I’ve been following quite avidly since my previous post about it. People will keep dipping their bread into their soup. Facebook needs to change if it wants to fend off against this impending problem. Either they find a way to beat the 150 number, by changing the way we communicate and stay in touch, or a new social contender comes to the fore that keeps your connections to under 150 (via some implicit social graph machine).

Suffice to say, I am definitely keeping an eye on this! All this talking about soup has made me hungry.

The find of the day is Qwerly.

It’s tagline is: A data API for the social web. It recently ‘pivoted’ a month ago to provide only an API. In short they want to be the “DNS for the social web”. In other words, it is to be the database where social-profiles of people can be found. It started out where one could search for other profiles using a Twitter handle. During April however, the amount of API requests (30 million) far exceeded the 50 000 people visiting the main site. The idea is solid, a service which is lacking. Searching for other profiles isn’t available now, but duckduckgo (an alternative search engine) incorporated it into their search results.

As you can see, it fetched my linked,youtube,posterous, friendfeed and klout accounts. It didn’t find some of my other profiles, because I presume it is because I use different e-mails.

It only pivoted recently and is now almost a year old overall. I foresee definitely great things for them.

P.S. It didn’t find my last.fm account. Considering we (atTweekly.fm) have a db of Twitter+Last.fm connections, maybe they would want to start crawling that as well (need some help)?

I’ve only had a great impression of Singapore! The humid weather took some time getting used to, but the rest of the city was amazing. Everything just works, and is clean. It feels like the city is your playground.

The competition itself was awesome. It was so great to meet so many students from so many different countries, all studying what you study.

Our awesome teamhost (Aakriti Goel) took us sightseeing all over Singapore (including the clubs). Without her, our trip would’ve been bland!

All in all, Singapore was an amazing experience, the people I’ve met, the competition itself and the city itself!

Considering it was our first time in South East Asia, we took the next week to visit Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Bangkok. We only had a week, so we opted for going with trains so we can take in the feeling of the countries (not just the cities).

We managed to see the spectacular Petronas Towers and visit the Batu Caves (Hindu religious site within limestone caves).

We then took the train Kuala Lumpur to Penang and then to Bangkok.

Bangkok was crazy. I’ve never seen a city like it before. With our (relatively) laid-back South African cities, Bangkok was a culture shock. By then I was more used to the hot weather, although it still felt like walking through a swimming pool (36 degrees celsius + 90% humidity).

We stayed around the corner from the famous Khaosan road.

When we flew back, we flew via Dubai. I was quite excited to catch a glimpse of the Burj Khalifa. Magnificent testament to human engineering.

If anyone wants to know more about our trip (where we stayed, what trains we took and so forth), don’t hesitate to comment and ask.

Today, I found Google’s Prediction API. This is incredible. It allows you to utilise Google’s machine learning algorithms and get back predictions.

Interesting things that can be done with it:

• Given a user’s past viewing habits, predict what other movies or products a user might like.
• Categorize emails as spam or non-spam.
• Analyze posted comments about your product to determine whether they have a positive or negative tone.
• Guess how much a user might spend on a given day, given his spending history.

It essentially pushes a large chunk of processing to Google. I’ve found very few API’s that actually provide processing. This is new, and could bring forth an interesting trend for specialised processing API’s (that might even charge for its use).

Anyone know of other processing API’s?