I’ve always been one to choose my own adventure. In the past, this has led me to found and work at a string of small scrappy startups, of which I am immensely proud. But new challenges are also important - they help us to grow and hone our craft.

A couple of months ago, I went down to Chirp - Twitter’s developer conference - to promote a Twitter app I developed called BirdHerd. While BirdHerd received some great press during the conference, what really happened was I was struck by two things:

• The quality and passion of the team at Twitter
• The scale of the problems the team are tackling

Basically, I realized that I wanted to play too. All of those users. All of that data. The scale - It was all just too irresistible. I was sold.

I believe that Twitter is a truly transformative product - so much so that I think we have trouble even imagining where it will take us in the years to come. Will Twitter be able to tell us who our next President will be, before voting even starts? Could Twitter help spread revolutions in far away countries? Perhaps Twitter will fundamentally change how businesses interact with their customers… Who knows! But I *do* know I want to be there front and center to find out.

Twitter is a product that I use every day, and I’m incredibly stoked to be working on making it better.

So in the immortal words of James Brown:

Click on the image below to play around with the tool.

For the technically inclined, the tool was built using the JS library Raphael and the data was manipulated using Ruby.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find the number of times the top 10% or 20% of tracks are played, but we also thought it would be interesting to compare some of this “popularity” data from the R3 website with that of music site last.fm. We found the comparison to be actually quite interesting, in a geeky/push-the-glasses-back-up-on-nose kinda way.

We looked at plays of the top 100 tracks on both services for a given week, and found that “popularity” is noticeably skewed towards the mega hits on last.fm, in comparison to R3. For example, the most popular track on last.fm accounts for well over twice as many of top 100 plays as its R3 counterpart. Also, the top 20 tracks on last.fm account for almost 40% of the plays of the top 100 songs. This is in contrast to less then 30% for the top 20 on R3. Check out the chart below to see the differences.

While we don’t pretend to know all the reasons for the difference in the popularity curves between these two services, it’s certainly fun to speculate! Perhaps CBC R3 visitors are more exploratory then last.fm users, often venturing out past the obvious tracks on the website. Or maybe Canadian audiences are not as influenced by the massive music marketing machine as the predominately US based last.fm audience. In a perfect world, I would like to imagine that Canada’s history of providing recording and tour grants for artists has helped fuel both the creation of this large back catalog of interesting music, while at the same time, helping build demand.

What do you think is behind difference in “popularity” between R3 and last.fm?

(This is a repost from the R3Labs blog over at CBC R3)

As expected, we were able to confirm that Drummers, always the butt of jokes, were indeed often last on the list, while ego loving, spotlight hogging guitar players typically received top billing.

Check out the graphic for full breakdowns.

Stay tuned for more!

The data we have been given access to is very comprehensive! For example, we have data on over 40 million website track plays, going back to 2001 when “indie” still meant something, Last.fm and Gmail didn’t exist yet, and I was still touring with my own band.

One of the first things we did with this data was to geocode all 40 million of the listens, and plot it on a map using Processing. Check it out below:

R3Labs: The R3 40 Million! from blprnt on Vimeo.

I’m going to be doing some regular posts here with updates from this project, so stay tuned!

I built BirdHerd because I needed a way for the many startups I work with to use Twitter effectively.

In the past, we always just shared a common password amongst team members, but this became troublesome when a team member would leave and we’d have to change the password, and then we’d have to tell everyone what the new password is. Or someone would forget the password, reset it it to something new, and effectively lock everyone out. Needless to say, this was not ideal, and had the undesired effect of causing people to not update the group Twitter account as often as they could.

Next, I started looking at a few existing Twitter tools, but I definitely wanted something that would work from any client or device. Our team members use TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMS and the Twitter web site, and I knew that if they had to log into a different web app to update the group account (like other group Twitter tool CoTweet forces you to do), the updates wouldn’t flow as fast as they could/should. I also wanted to use oAuth to manage passwords safely. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to both communicate publicly by posting messages from the Twitter account, but I also wanted to be able to send a private group message to all my team members (through a DM).

I couldn’t find such a tool, and so, with a firm belief that there had to be a better way, BirdHerd was born – and you can try it right now. It’s even getting some good initial press! I hope it makes using Twitter with your group or team easy.

But what’s going on here? Why on earth would hipsters in skinny jeans be riding these brakeless death traps through one of the most hilly cities in the world?

Riders will often justify their decision to ride a fixie by stating that “Fix gear bikes require less maintenance” (This is true, but you also have no brakes, so I feel the maintenance issue is a bit of a red hearing) or “The feel of the ride is unbeatable” (As long as you’re not going up hill, or trying to stop quickly), but really, I think something else entirely different is going on.

I have a hypothesis. To illustrate my hypothesis, consider the peacock.

Male peacocks have incredible tail plumage in all kinds of bright, iridescent colors. These tail feathers serve no immediate practical advantage, and in fact, actually acts as a handicap. The tail feathers are essentially advertising to other peacocks, “Look. I have this ridiculous plumage that gives away my location to potential predators, and I’m still alive! Therefore, my genes must be very good. Want some of me? I know you do…”. For the peacock (and it’s tail feathers), it’s all about how much can you handicap yourself and still survive, because that’s how a peacock will attract the best mate. Check out Amotz Zahavi’s landmark paper in the Journal of theoretical Biology for more details.

Moving back to fixed gear bikes, the way I’ve started to look at the phenomena is that individuals - usually young males - are “handicapping” themselves by removing brakes and gears, and essentially advertising to potential mates “I have no gears, and no brakes. I live in the hilliest city in North America, and I’m still alive. I must rule. Want some of me? I know you do…”

So really, I think the fixed gear bike craze is simply the evolutionary process of sexual selection run amok.

With the coming ski season (which I’m really excited about) I was spending some time on the Whistler Blackcomb website checking out the conditions, and I happened to notice a few public data feeds. One of these feeds contains the status of all the lifts on Whistler and Blackcomb, so of course, I had to hook it up to Twitter. The WhistlerBot updates its twitter stream every time a lifts status changes, and from my visit to the ski hill last weekend, it seems to do so in pretty close to real time.

When I was on the hill, I turned on mobile notifications for just this account (so I don’t get distracted with other Twitter noise) and now my pocket will vibrate whenever the Peak chair changes from standby to open, for example. No one likes to ski in a tracked out bowl, right?…

While I was at it, I also threw up the slightly hilarious, but still useful isthepeakopen.com and gave the WhistlerBot its own home.

Hope other folks find these useful too.

- Tried the online demo, and loved the user experience and admin dashboard. Very polished UI for an Open Source project. (+1 for Magento)
- Huge download (-1 for Magento)
- Convoluted download process and scant details for the SVN checkout (-1 for Magento)
- The Zend framework. Magento is built on the Zend Framework, and in my opinion, the Zend Framework is like a hole in the head. Everyone has their favorite flavour of ice cream, so this is really just my personal preference, but coming from something like Rails to the Zend Framework is like running full speed into a brick wall. Does one really need an XML configuration file to point to the location of other XML configuration files? Yeeessh (-2 for Magento)
- Decent web admin tools to add products and create a catalog. Clients could (mostly) grok it. (+1 for Magento)
- Pretty straight forward to theme, although it could be easier. (+1 for Magento)

Totally subjective and largely meaningless score: -1 (Magento’s weaknesses slightly outweigh positives, in my opinion)

So in summary, Magento is a large, (overly?) complex code base with a great admin and frontend user interface. It’s fairly easy to skin, but I found developing custom functionality a drag. Keep in mind, this was the first Magento site I’ve built, and there’s always a learning curve for every project.

My biggest complaint though is something that I have trouble even articulating. It’s a “vibe”, if you will. Having worked on the Drupal project for a number of years, I have seen first hand how an open source project can (and should) be run. The Magento team could learn a lot from looking at the development processes that projects like Drupal and WordPress employ. For example, with Magento extensions, in most cases, it seemed to not be possible to download actual source code, but rather, you had to enter a key and then Magento would download the package for you. In almost all cases, it feels like the actual source code is kept away from end users. Where is the place to file, and track bugs against various extensions? Where can I browse the source code online? How can I contribute bug fixes? To me, an open source project should be more then trial ware, with an option to upgrade to a premium edition. Open source software is largely about community development, and I don’t see an active developer community hacking away on Magento.

Other alternatives: (open source) Ubercart, Spree (Monthly fee) Shopify, FoxyCart

Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!