With MuseBuzz you’re given one click, and PC or Mac, it automatically reads your iTunes library, retrieves the list of artists, and gives you a nice, simple interface to select (all are defaulted selected) or deselect the artists you do or don’t want to receive new music notifications for.  I left mine all checked, and look forward to receiving e-mail notifications for the artists I listen to in my library.

While it would be nice to have more filtering options and maybe a smarter recommendations filter to suggest my most frequently listened artists (maybe using Last.fm or Pandora data?), this is definitely a step much further than Apple has been able to provide in their own iTunes interface.  I am unaware of any other service that does similar.  The site requires a simple registration to get your e-mail address and a login, but after that you’re immediately presented with your list of artists.

MuseBuzz is founded by Chase Brammer, a new entrepreneur and local Utah Flex expert.  For such a simple business concept, I’m excited to see what new songs show up in my inbox next.  The service is completely free and you can run it at MuseBuzz.com.

You can see Chase’s presentation at Launchup on Ustream here.

Tonight I’ll be sharing all the details most businesses won’t share about themselves with SocialToo – yes, it’s a risk, but I am a big believer in transparency. You’ll hear about how many users we have, how much revenue we’re bringing in per month, where I see our weaknesses and strengths to be, etc.  I’ll show you a demo about how you can get set up with a SocialToo account and DM spam filters for Twitter in under 2 minutes with just the click of a button.

This week Launchup will also start bringing these entrepreneur features to the world with Ustream.  You can watch anywhere in the world on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/launchup or on the main website at http://www.launchup.org/live.  The event starts at 6pm, and will also feature presentations by MuseBuzz and PageMass (which I got a demo of yesterday – I think bloggers are going to like this one).  Launchup is organized by Jeremy Hanks, CEO and founder of Doba.com, another Guy Kawasaki Advisorship company (as is SocialToo).  Come join and say hi!

You can read a brief Q&A I did for them at http://www.launchup.org/2009/11/09/socialtoo-qa/.

Then, today, Robert Scoble pointed out that you could see the new Geolocation feature launched in Seesmic Desktop in action by viewing Ryan Sarver’s tweets in the Twitter client.  This makes me wonder how Ryan is broadcasting his location.  Does Twitter have an internal iPhone app they are using, or are these just proof of concept images for other developers to use in their own apps?

Twitter has long been criticized for the lack of a good native mobile client.  They have also admitted in the past that a new version of at least the mobile web client is in the roadmap.  Could they be taking this a step further and building an entire iPhone app out of it?

Based on current facts the natural assumption would be that this is just an internal app they are using to test out mobile features like geo-location.  The roughness of the screenshots and focus on just geolocation that we know of thus far lends to that conclusion.  However, it’s important for all developers to be prepared, and be aware that in any market sustained by just Twitter your greatest competitor could just be your supplier of information (a concept I learned in business school), Twitter itself.  If you’re developing an iPhone or mobile app for Twitter this is indeed something you should always be prepared for.

Here are the screenshots – you tell me. Is Twitter building an internal iPhone app?

Sutorius worked since July of 2007 on Facebook’s Platform Policy team, the team at Facebook in charge of enforcing policy infringements on Facebook’s developer platform.  The team ensures applications are following policy, not storing information more than 24 hours, aren’t serving deceptive ads, etc.  Now it would appear he could be doing similar things on a team working to shore up its own platform policy agreement.  Brian was there when Facebook grew through their own policy changes – Facebook Platform was launched around May of 2007.

It’s exciting to see Twitter bringing more veteran talent into their team.  With the previous hire of Josh Elman, Facebook’s former Platform Manager, and now Brian Sutorius, Twitter is solidifying its effort to innovate and bring Twitter closer to Facebook as a competitor.  As I said earlier, it’s these types of hires that are making me more excited about Twitter.  We’ll see if they live up to the people they’re hiring and keep things moving forward.

To start, users with this feature will have a message at the top of their stream mentioning they have the new features.  Each Tweet in your timeline on Twitter.com will have a new “retweet” icon that appears similar to the “reply” link when you mouse over a Tweet.  When you click on it, you are asked if you want to retweet the message.  Click “yes”, and it gets popped at the top of your friends’ streams, along with a mention that you retweeted it (this is very similar to the way “likes” work on FriendFeed – the message keeps getting recycled so long as people keep liking it).

Underneath each message, it lists each user that retweeted the post.  Instead of being icons of each user, it looks like Twitter is now going the FriendFeed method and listing out the text usernames of each user.  This also brings more discovery potential for each user that retweeted it.

So, today marks the day Twitter grows even more like FriendFeed it would seem.  I think this will eventually become even more powerful than the old-form “RT soandso” format because it is much easier to just click a button than type text, but we’ll see how frequently people use this and if the old style continues to be tradition as it is today.  ”Retweets” are the new like.  Do you have it?  Do you “like” the new retweet feature?

The images above are just 2 of the images listed on Nick Shinn’s blog.  Be sure to check out his blog for more screenshots and info.  You can follow him on Twitter here.

Internet problems yesterday aside (today seems to be a little better), Paypal has aimed to please.  Starting off with some amazing keynotes and announcements of an incredible flexible payments platform for developers showcasing some amazing companies that have implemented this platform, it just didn’t stop there!  Paypal continued to impress, offering every developer at the event a free Eee PC Netbook.  The internet quickly went down from additional traffic.

The event was filled to the brim with snacks, food, drinks, and things to feed developers brains as they would think of the next big idea utilizing the Paypal X developer platform.  Freebies were everywhere.  Sessions included all kinds of howtos and tutorials on how to implement the platform.

Then, concluding the event, an amazing party ensued full of speed painters, dancing, music, “Stomp”-like performers, drinks, food, and more.  Audience members and attendees were able to truly build connections with each other.  They were treated like royalty, and their brains and stomachs were fed.

Paypal has done an amazing job at this conference.  It’s something that many, including myself will remember for years to come.  Thank you, Paypal, for allowing me the opportunity to come out and be a part of this amazing experience.  I hope there are many more to come and others will also be able to experience this in the future.  Paypal truly understands that developers are the “X” factor in their product.  I’m stoked to see what I can do with it.

The move makes sense, but searching Twitter during the Keynote revealed a different story.  Audience members are skeptical, stating things like “scary morning talk by the Paypal CTO. all your ID belonging to us. a closed OpenID?” and “wonder if this is what @timOreilly is afraid of – platforms becoming the OS?”.  In many ways these audience members have a point – is it possible for Paypal to go alone in this identity space when they could either be leading or joining existing identity efforts such as OpenID?  I may be wrong but I do not recall any mention of the word “open” in his proposal.  And when he mentions things like “they are working with Government” it gets a little scary that a single company may control all this along with government.

At the same time, maybe this is the solution.  Will the solution to identity be a closed platform that has devoted ways of verifying identity like Paypal and Ebay can provide?  Does the web need a “more secure” closed platform to finally solve the identity problem?

I’m very interested to see how Paypal progresses on this.  My hope is that they either lead or join existing open standards in this effort, and rather than taking this alone they approach others.  A platform is always a good thing, but a platform is not “open” until it is based on open technologies and the technologies themselves are built by the community.  This is especially applicable in the identity space.

Paypal’s CEO yesterday reiterated that through the years payment itself was controlled by a few big entities.  Paypal’s vision is ”Into the hands of many” , intending to pass that control to the developers.  He even compared it to Linux and how the future is in the community and no one company having control.  My hope is that Paypal maintains this standard in the identity arena.  Based on their vision so far it looks hopeful – let’s hope they don’t feel the need to take the Identity platform alone.

When it’s uploaded you can listen to the whole Keynote in my Cinch folder.

“X”. It’s a common variable used in many a code base.  It’s one of the most common variables of any code base.  It’s what counts.  That’s what Paypal wants to become in the hands of developers, as they stated in their kickoff Keynotes yesterday morning at the Paypal X Innovate developers conference in San Francisco.  Paypal is bringing back the name of their original developer platform, called “X”, to introduce new, easier, and better ways of facilitating transactions for developers.

Paypal has big visions for their new payments platform.  As Ebay CEO Jon Donahue stated, “I believe Paypal will be bigger than Ebay because Paypal can power all e-commerce”.  It would appear any rumors to Ebay selling off Paypal may be bunk in the eyes of their CEO.  Together, Paypal and its customers are working to release the next wave in payments integration. Yesterday Paypal announced a new adaptive payments platform at x.com in which developers are now going to have the capability to integrate into their own applications.  Among the examples shared:

Integration of Paypal into your online banking experience — an example was shared of a bank enabling you to pay your friends by simply visiting your bank’s website, entering the e-mail address of your friend, and sending the transaction to that friend through Paypal.  (I wish my banks allowed this!)

Facebook Integration – Payvment did a presentation of their software that enables developers and website owners to integrate an entire shopping cart experience via just a simple snippet of Javascript code.  They also announced that they are open sourcing this software for Facebook developers to also integrate this same shopping cart experience into their own Facebook apps.  (This is very valuable!)  I’ll try to do an interview with them tomorrow.

Sun and Java Integration – Sun Microsystems did a demo of their own sharing how they were using Paypal’s X Platform in their Java store

Mobile – With the launch, Paypal is launching new mobile SDKs.  They did a demo on the spot integrating a simple payment code using Paypal’s iPhone SDK in XCode.  A couple drags and drops and copies and pastes and they had a fully-integrated payment experience on the phone.

In addition to the launch of their new platform, Paypal announced a series of new payment standards.  The payments will be adaptive, depending on the amount being charged, making a very appealing option for micro-payments to even very large payments depending on the size of the transaction.  In addition, developers will be able to decide who pays the commission, something different from their current developer platform, meaning the business itself does not have to pay the commission.  The commission can be paid by either the seller or the buyer, ensuring new and creative ways of facilitating payment transactions.

Paypal’s new X platform of course compares with Amazon’s Flexible Payment System.  Later today I’ll do a post comparing the two as I’m able to gather more data.  With the new platform it would seem that Paypal is putting the pressure on Amazon and stepping up the game of finally getting rid of the cash in your wallet in favor of much easier payment services in the cloud.

I look forward to sharing more from the conference.  I’m very intrigued by some of the Facebook solutions, as well as Twitter payment systems and I’ll share those as I get them.  I’ll also be watching the various ways other companies are utilizing the platform.

I truly believe we’re on the cusp of an entirely new wave of payments.  The competition is on in full strength at Paypal X Innovate and I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Here are a few Cinch recordings I did of the keynotes in case you missed them:

http://www.cinchcast.com/user/default.aspx?albumUrl=Paypal-X-Innovate

This got me thinking – why are services so reliant on Twitter to get the word out to their customers?  Have we gotten that lazy? In the past a service with “Fanatical Support” would have sent out a brief e-mail to their customers notifying them of the update.  Do they just expect all their customers to be checking every single one of their Twitter updates?  I have to admit as a customer I’m a bit disappointed.

I don’t mean to pick on just Rackspace though.  Rackspace aren’t the only ones doing this.  It has come to be common practice amongst companies to just post status updates on their own Twitter account and (occasionally) blog without using the oldest means of notification, a push means for that matter out to their users – e-mail.  I admit even my own service SocialToo has been guilty of this occasionally and I have vowed for more mission-critical issues facing my customers that we will try to be more diligent in letting them know, via e-mail of the issues facing them, as soon as possible.  That said, I’m one of two employees/contractors working for the company right now, as compared to Rackspace’s and other companies’ hundreds.

I think it’s time companies that provide mission-critical services start laying off the Twitter Kool-Aid, and focusing on more serious means such as e-mail so their customers can become aware, as the issues are happening to the accounts they pay for.  It’s time we get back to using e-mail as a communications medium.  Now that I’m aware of the issue, I’m checking their blog frequently for updates, but a simple e-mail would have made huge strides in making the $600 I pay monthly to the service more worth it.

As of the end of this writing it appears the problems are mostly resolved.  I am anxiously awaiting an e-mail explaining the problem, but hope in the future they can get infrastructure in place to quickly notify us via e-mail as fast as they were able to do on Twitter.  I hope other services can also learn from this and prepare for similar circumstances.  While I’ll continue to enjoy the service I’ve had from Slicehost, I would have liked to see more than just a Twitter update surrounding this.

UPDATE: Ironically, Ed Millard on FriendFeed pointed out that the support address for Rackspace is twitter@rackspace.com. sigh

What is Paypal X Innovate?  It’s a conference for developers on the new Paypal X development platform.  At the conference, Paypal will be announcing their new platform, showcasing what you can do with it, and supposedly will be announcing a few surprises as well.  At the event you can expect to see speakers such as Tim O’Reilly, John Donahoe, and Om Malik, amongst many other industry luminaries interested in this space.  Paypal’s going all out at this conference!  I even hear there’s a special surprise gift for each conference attendee.

So if you’ll be at the event, come say hi!  If you haven’t signed up, the event is sold out, but there may be a few tickets available for walk-ins if you want to try the day of.  I’ll be covering everything I can while I’m out there both here, and on my Facebook Fan Page at http://facebook.com/stay. I look forward to seeing you!