Study Study

The topic says it all. I have one semester left, until I graduate (if all goes smoothly) with a degree in Socio-Informatics and Marketing. My plans are up in the air for next year. I’m kinda ‘over’ studying. If the honours program in Socio-Informatics turn out to be super interesting, it might become an option to continue with my studies at Stellenbosch. But the problem with Stellenbosch, is that the longer you stay here, the greater the comfort zone and bubble it becomes. Something might happen with Tweekly.fm that sees me jump full-time into that after I get my degree. So far my default option is going to be to head to Melbourne next year. I have temp visa, so why not take the option?

Tweekly.fm

It is growing. And growing well. We are pushing a lot of tweets a day (as much as the whole of Twitter did a day back in 2007). And by the nature of our service, it will keep growing. A new server that sits at last.fm (thanks guys!) is also doing wonders for both the respective API’s (last.fm and twitter), making it faster and better. A host of new features will be rolled out later this year, making discovering new music much easier. So in that regard, it is going good. Now we still need to figure out that business model…

TwimeMachine

My TwimeMachine is also doing really well. A new design was made by Misha Kvakin. It gets these random ’spikes’ of traffic when some ’social media expert’ tweets about it. Always great to see. It is also win to know that apparently it was mentioned at Mesh Conference in Toronto. I don’t know in what capacity, just that it was.

Music

I have a soundcloud profile now for my new moniker, Simon Segfault. I’ve been making some dubstep. So go have a listen. I’ve decided that the next album/music I release must be top-notch. In that past when I had 10 songs, I just said, ‘k lets release it’, but this time I’m taking a different approach. And damn me for my big musical influences. I just don’t know what it will end up like. Might be dubstep/drum and bass album, or it might be lyrically inspired, blues, guitar electronica. Just don’t know. Might also do something with my brother that could turn into a vocal chiptune album. Maybe I’ll just all the above genres? Drum-blues-and-chip-step rock?

So I have one semester left to figure what happens next year? The options are so varied… For now, I’m just going to enjoy my holiday.

So, Facebook changed that your interests (music, books, etc) links to the appropriate pages. Smooth move. No really. It’s a smart move. I ‘like’ something and it shows up on my facebook profile. Sound reasonable… but I don’t want to show on my facebook profile ALL my ‘likes’. I expected the worst from deleting all my ‘likes’. There goes my ‘likes’ to all the local bands I was following for updates.

So I subsequently searched for all the local bands I was following, “liked” them again.

It is annoying, and there might be some user revolt, but facebook will probably do nothing, because you know, more than a half of facebook are stupid anyway. They will just click “yes. link everything to profiles”, install another app that spams my wall, play some farmville and update their status in unintelligible text-speak. Facebook will rake in the connections and extending the ‘like’ to the rest of the web (as they have done). Insta-extreme-targeted ads. Money. More money.

It is becoming sickening how obvious it is that Facebook wants to become the web. I’m waiting with bated breath for a new truly closed online social network.

P.S. Yes, this post has an air of ranting about it.

Some of the more popular streaming sites like “imeem” that died allowed you to post tweets from it, but I’m rather looking at sites specifically built for this purpose.

So here is the list in order of alexa rank (as of this post):

blip.fm – 4,449

It’s strongest feature is its first mover advantage. Started before most other services and although it claims to be “twitter for music”, it sees Twitter as a distribution channel, not its main feature. Decent service, nice backing. Used it some time ago, but haven’t really after that.

twiturm.com – 59,319

“Twiturm.com is the easiest way to socialize your music. Created for the artist, Twiturm is to be used as a promotional tool to promote their music.” TWIT Ur Music. Used more as promotional tool. P.S. They should get rid of the easter background. Really hurts my eyes.

tweetmysong.com - 143,567

Almost missed this one. Like twiturm. Post YOUR music. Very easy to do. Kudos for that. Still uses basic auth and has no twitter account??

song.ly – 189,228

Simple and sleek. Embedded player. Competitive advantage is its various ways to easily post songs (API) and integration into several twitter apps.

twt.fm – 189,563

Very similar to song.ly. Has API, searches for songs, has userpages that looks like twitter. Love the design (in fact most of Lee Martin’s designs). Simplistic. Competitive advantage. 1,600,00+ followers. Tweet a popular song: get lots of RT, get lots of traffic. Simple.

swift.fm – 209,969

Uses twitter “to help you discover, share and enjoy new music”. Focus is on friends. Very much infused with twitter. It is a lot like Blip.fm in a way, but also allows you to upload your own songs. Seen few comments of people switching to swift.fm because of that reason. One to watch.

bln.kr – 250,630

Also very simplistic. Focuses on sharing YOUR music, much like twiturm.com.

twtmuzik.net – 305,412

Same thing. Share mp3’s on twitter. Don’t like the design (bit broken in chrome). Also no twitter account?

twones.com – 310,987

They aren’t really clear exactly what it does. Joined a while ago in the invite stage. Now that I came back, its different and focused on the music bar. Aims to “bookmark” music on the web. Sounds interesting. It can scrobble to last.fm which helps! They should watch out for extension.fm (looks mighty awesome!) though.

tweekly.fm – 349,396

My site, run with Scott. Can’t be too biased here. Core service: Share your last.fm top weekly artists. Very reliable on twitter and last.fm. Mashup. More interesting features coming soon.

tinysong.com – 354,484

Grooveshark powered music sharing tool. Pretty simple. Did some hunting and actually found out it was created by the marketing director of Grooveshark. Nice. Has an API too.

maestro.fm – 358,503

Still don’t know where to position them. Let the blurb on the site speak for itself. “stored your music in the cloud, share and discover”. You must download a maestro connector to connect to your home PC. You basically play your songs through the web. They should put the FAQ on the frontpage. I had to figure out what it does.

twisten.fm – 1,095,911

Listen to Twitter. Powered by Grooveshark. So basically, you aren’t using a service to ‘tweet’ it. Was popular, but dropping. Don’t know why they still have basic auth. Team also incorporates the marketing director of Grooveshark. Looks like he has hand in some music sharing pie. I wonder if he bid for song.ly.

songtwit.com, swg.fm – > 1,600,000

Both of these, I find hard to distinguish. Simple, but much better services out there.

imusictweet.com – 4,492,053

Surprised I found this. Launched 30th of March. “Share and stream songs or playlists for free”. More like song.ly and twt.fm than swift.fm and blip.fm. Struggling to find how it differentiates from the other offerings. Don’t like the design that much.

listento.fm > 5,000,000

Not directly “linked” to twitter through authentication. Interesting system, but ultimately laborious. Too many steps to tweet a song. listento.fm creates a page to “listen to it” by the whatever way your provided the link, but you have to post the link yourself. One can just post a link to the youtube video or mp3 itself?

tweetmylast.fm – 7,658,433

Very blah. “It’s just a way to annoy your followers on twitter with what you last.fm is tracking”.

—–

So yeah. That’s my list I scoured the net for. I think I found most of them. Also, thanks to twitdom for finding the ones google didn’t. Let me know if there is more.

I also created a twitter list for most the sites’ twitter accounts. Here it is: http://twitter.com/shotbeak/sharemusic

My thoughts were echoed on RWW follow up post to what happened. Just a brief background on what happened. People searched “facebook login”, came upon RWW’s article, mistook it for Facebook, signed in via Facebook Connect and ranted how its new “design sucks ass”. To all of us in the “know”, it is funny and facepalm worthy. How idiotic could these people be? Can’t they distinguish between these things?

Apparently not:

As the web is becoming global (1 Billion+), it is becoming the playground for people not literate at all with basic things like a URL. They see Facebook as a product/service, not as a website that is part of the WWW.

It begs the question if these people are actually idiotic at all? Yes, they might not know the inner workings of the web, do you know the inner workings of a TV (or something equally complex)? Bad example, but you catch my drift.

Shouldn’t this “portal” to the net, being Google’s search bar allow us to take us where we want to go on the “interwebs”? It makes perfect sense to want to type into Google, “login Facebook”, to take me to where I want to be, without having to click on a search result.

How Google would deduce this when people would just want to “search” the term I’ll leave to the semantic experts. I have some ideas though.

1) Once it becomes clear what the user’s purpose is for each intended search, Google could ask the “searcher”, considering they are logged on with a profile, if that is their intention each time? Click yes, and it does it all the time.

2) We could use the power of humans to vote on preferred actions for terms. People vote that if you type in “login facebook”, it takes you there, while others might vote that it should stay a search term. There are obvious flaws with this approach and possibility for exploitation.

3) Pay? Enough money will convince Google. Instead of using the normal “sponsored by google” ads at the top of some search results, it could be a different colour with a click-able link that immediately takes you to facebook. If you cookies are set, it’s logged in. I guess this approach is very much similar to ads, but there is the potential to add further action with these links.

4) Invent new search “terms” such as the already established “define: <word>”. If you type in “login: Facebook”, it should take you stored Facebook login data on Google’s profile and immediately log yourself in, or just immediately take you to Facebook if you are already logged in.

——–

These are just some ideas I had to write down. Kept thinking about it whole day. What do you think? The approaches above are flawed. Can you think of any way to approach this? Would Google even want people to NOT view their search results?

So, I present Twimemachine.com. It’s old tweets, but kinda better. Think oldtweets 1.2.

So, if you want to browse your old tweets with a simple interface, go to twimemachine.com and browse away!

Yes, twitter still doesn’t allow third party developers to browse past 3200 tweets.

Got any question, just post here. I’m also hosting a competition. I want a nifty “novel app” frontpage design, so anyone who thinks they can design a neat frontpage, can have a link to their website on the frontpage.

Due to monetary and time constraints, I had to get up a watered-down version of Tweekly.fm: It only works manually. You enter your data and click send. As easy as that.

When I come back in January, things will hopefully start working again as it should (tweeting automatically). While last.fm did not want to buy Tweekly.fm, there is something else in the pipeline that will get Tweekly.fm back to its (automatic tweeting) glory it had a month ago. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later.

Sorry for the inconvenience guys! Thanks for the year as well!

And remember, keep listening.

I started it in the beginning of the year with next to no development experience. I still don’t have any legit development experience apart from hacking together MySQL and PHP with ducktape. This past few weeks has been an insanely hectic ride for Tweekly.fm!

First, I moved away from my current shared hosting to Mediatemple’s (dv) which completely failed on me. It hit the memory cap from all the traffic that was coming in. This week, I moved to Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, I’m really impressed with the service. It could keep up with traffic really well, until I realised it had a hard cap on its .php scripts of 15min, which meant instant fail for my completely inefficient script.

I’m at a loss with what to do now. I realise the way I’m doing it now, simple just won’t work with the resources I have. I’m currently busy with a redesign, but I can’t keep the current Tweekly.fm up and running efficiently.

Considering that I am still a full-time student, I can’t spend all my time developing it.

So from next week unfortunately, Tweekly.fm will not be automated anymore. It will only work manually. You enter your data, you tweet. I will work to the best of my ability behind the scene to get it back to automated form when it is possible.

There is also another way to keep Tweekly.fm going… Get last.fm to buy Tweekly.fm. This way, the automation can occur with real ease on super slick servers and better programmers making it great.

If you would like that, I would appreciate an RT.

Apologies to those who like their Tweekly.fm to be automated.

The idea itself is brilliant, probably garnering many facepalms of “why didn’t I think of that?”. What intrigues me most is that this basically means, bar a few examples, that carrying money around has once again become even more pointless.

With the advent of the internet, money has been disappearing into digital numbers, something that’s never in your “hands” anymore. You still have to carry cash around for “petty” payments, but with the advent of Square I see it lessening even more. It is disturbing actually to think that the essential thing that determines my well-being is actually so frivolous. I can’t physically account for my well-being anymore. It is disappearing.

I say bring on a new crowdsourced economy without money driven by our desire to innately collaborate  through the reduced opportunity to communicate through the internet to share what we love to do.

I don’t have the funds and the banner on top here will barely cover the costs of hosting a dedicated server.

In the past week I’ve received generous donations, thank you very much! I don’t want to resort to having sign-ups be donationware, so I ask you, Tweekly.fm user, please donate any amount. I plan to attain only $1000. If only a quarter of you pay $1 it will be more than enough!

All the money will go towards paying the hosting in the upcoming year.

As a reward the person who donated the most will receive a permanent thank-you on the frontpage of the new Tweekly.fm.

Click here to go to the donation page.

Given the incredible growth of Tweekly.fm, it has really been struggling under its current hosting. From this coming Wednesday, you will only be able to sign up with Tweekly.fm if you make a donation.

This is only temporary. As a full-time student (sitting with my textbook beside my laptop: writing exams next week), I just don’t have the time to research servers, optimise the code and work on Tweekly.fm.

When the holidays arrive (sweet glorious 2 months of freedom), I will do everything in my power to upgrade the Tweekly.fm experience, move onto new servers, etc.

SHORT FAQ:

1) Service will continue as usual. Old users won’t have to do anything. Just sit back as usual and enjoy the tweets roll by.

2) Any new users from Wednesday will have to pay a donation to sign up until Tweekly.fm can handle the growth.

3) This is only temporary. A new server will most likely appear in the beginning of December, when I will switch it back to its current state.

———–

This coming wednesday, Tweekly.fm will probably hit 15 000 users. So, this is just another BIG thank you to all you music lovers! If you are current user, donations are also welcome! Just go to Tweekly.fm (it is on the front page).

I will keep you posted.

Keep listening.