globallistic: twitter

Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Saturday, December 19, 2009

What I Did at Music Hackday...

A few weeks ago I spent the weekend up in Boston at the first stateside "Music Hackday". It was a fantastic event all-around... the organization, the facilities, the people, the panels (even though I was on the panel about "The Future of Music") and the hacks.

For me, the highlight was really just spending time hanging out with other music tech geeks (metabrew, toby, jwheare, __lucas, lucas_gonze, dankantor, plamere, fascinated, theineke, bwhitman and many more)... bouncing ideas off of each other, and collaboratively building interesting things.

Why wife, somewhat famously, referred to it as like "a dungeons and dragons conference from music geeks".

Being in the same room with all of these other folks meant that I could not-so-subtly plant ideas for other people's hacks that would support some use cases that I am interested in. Toby Padilla appeased me (thanks Toby!) by adding some support to his great Playgrub app to support scraping artist and track metadata from Twitter so that the content could be resolved using Playdar (or more specifically by the content resolver plug-ins for Playdar that I have installed).

Not sure what I am talking about? Maybe it's easier just to watch. Want to try it yourself?

Just tweet:

★ artist name ♫ track name #playtapus (or any other hashtag/playlist name)

Then use the Playgrub bookmarklet and let Playdar to do the rest.

In short, we are just dealing with extracting and moving song metadata around and handing it off to Playdar (which runs on your local machine). Playdar takes it from there and figures out the best place to source the content from and fulfills the link/play action.

Definitely check out Playgrub (and all of the other sites it supports), as well as the other excellent Playdar-powered web apps like Playlick (by James Wheare), PlaydarTunes (by Dan Kantor) and iTunesAirBridge (by Lucas Hrabrovsky).

Read more about it...

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/12/01/boston-music-hack-day-is-in-the-can/

http://blog.hypem.com/2009/11/music-hack-day-boston-wrap-up/

http://notes.variogr.am/post/255966005/music-hack-day-boston

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/11/music_hack_day_boston.html

http://www.grantcerny.com/blog/2009/11/22/music-hackday-boston/

http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/boston-music-hackday-links-round-up/

Last, but not least, big thanks to Dave Haynes, Jon Pierce and Paul Lamere for making the whole thing a reality. When's the next one in the U.S.?! :-)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Mediaor Infrastructure Upgrades

Image by Frank Hamm via Flickr

After suffering thr0ough continued issues with Yahoo Pipes and other infrastructure pieces used in Mediaor (loosely pronounced "meteor"), I finally "reassembled" the music/technology news and views mashup. I think the new set up will be much more reliable, plus it lets me update, add and filter news sources easily and quickly.

There are some more improvements that I still would like to make to the front-end (www.mediaor.com) and the twitter bot (@mediaor) but wanted to get the backend sorted out first.

As always, if there are any other blogs or news sites that you think would make a good addition just let me know.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Latest Experiment - Blip.fm Recommender Bot

Image via CrunchBase

For heavy Twitter users, we are all seeing the communication platform being used more and more heavily as a viral music/taste distribution tool. In my last post, I showed the traffic numbers of some of the more popular music services. One of the fastest growing at the moment is Blip.fm. That information served as the inspiration of my latest mashup... I wanted to create an easy way to request recommendations to be pushed back to me based on a song that I "blipped".

So, a rainy weekend later I present to you the basic concept. Here's how it works.

just add the tag #recsplease to any "blip" (that gets published to Twitter)
the mashup monitors Twitter for blips that have the tag/recommendation request
from the Blip.fm URL I go and fetch/scrape the artist name for the song that was shared
this "seed" artist is then used to generate an array of similar artists
it constructs a tweet and replies to the requester with the list of recommendations

The next piece will be to link those recommendations off to a playlist, mix or radio station that includes those recommendations (in addition to trying to optimize the whole thing to be better, strong, faster). Maybe later this week. As always, let me know if you have any suggestions.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Uncovery Revisited

A while ago I messed around with the idea of a Twitter bot that, using hashtags, would rebroadcast anything that someone thought that others should know about (e.g. "check out this band they are great"). The idea wasn't that these recommendations were directed at anyone in particular, but instead played upon the human nature of people wanting to tell other people about something they think is great (see latest buzz on Susan Boyle video from Britain's Got Talent).

I only took that original project so far, but today I revisited it briefly and made some tweaks (influenced by the existing Twitter bot @new_music).

Basically, it looks at Metacritic's movie feed, scrapes the scores off the pages (since they aren't in the feed itself) and filters the results to only display the stuff that has an aggregate metascore of 65 or greater. When it finds one of those, it then hits YouTube to pull the trailer for the video. From there it shortens the URL and then tweets the results out at @uncovery.

I may also start to splice in music, DVDs and other content too... but will let this run a while to see how it feels. As always, comments and thoughts welcome.

UPDATE: I also have spliced in Rotten Tomatoes feed too.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

What's In A Name?

I am a closet brand marketer. I often create "brands" (OK, I make up words - usually by combining multiples that when pronounced sound like another existing word) that I think could be interesting or evocative. Over the past decade, I have kept a running list of potential brand names (or tag lines) for the most random things... from fictional band names to non-existent apparel companies to portajohns (toilets) to my own music/tech aggregator "mediaor" (pronounced like "meteor").

As backwards as it sounds, sometimes these words provide a spark for a product idea that I may explore in the future (yes, I have a separate list for those).

For the "brands" that I think have some real potental (or just amuse me) I will go grab the domain name for too. In my opinion, the most promising ones are the ones that express an idea or feeling ("Google", "Amazon", "iPod", "Twitter"), not a literal product implementation or feature ("Search.com","Toys r Us", "CDnow") .

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I have been struggling with how to refer to my latest projects (e.g. "friendP3", "meP3", "ambient signal".). The labels of the implementations were constraining the larger ideas around passive publishing, content resolution, data aggregation and portability, the social graph and sharing. I know some will say that is stupid... "why try to brand it at all?". Well, if you want people to talk about something then I believe you need to provide them a common lexicon to do so (it also helps people find and track the conversations on topic - see Twitter).

So, now that I have made a short story long, I come to my point. For now on I am going to be referring to the collective of my recent music/tech science experiments as "Playtapus".

Yes, it is a combination of "play", "tap" and "us"... but also more a play on the fugly yet lovable platypus. No one is quite sure what it's place in evolutionary history is, but if nothing else... it's at least interesting. Really all this project aspires to be...

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Active Publishing of meP3s (in addition to Passive)

Here is the next piece of my Frankenstein (watch screencast).

It adds active publishing to the passive publishing that I'm doing from aggregated play data from multiple music services. So, when you are thinking of a song you just type it in, and it looks for a free-range MP3 version of that song, shortens the URL, and formats it so that playTwitter knows how to deal with it. This is similar to what I talked about before except I have automated the formating, finding and posting to Twitter to make it more user friendly.

I've also added a field that let's users create collaborative playlists using Twitter hashtags (see previous post). This lets any/all people to add songs to a particular playlist. For example, see the "bestof2009" playlist. By default anyone can add songs to this playlist just by using the same name/hashtag. Well, that's great, but what if you don't want other people's junk in your list? Just use the "advanced search" features of Twitter Search to filter it down. For example, here is the list with just my contributions.

Just like on any other webpage with MP3 links, the playTwitter bookmarklet lets you "play the page". So, filter it however you want, then play it.

#fp3Bestof2009 from:jherskowitz - Twitter Search

Monday, February 23, 2009

Collaborative Playlists via Twitter and Hashtags

Collaborative playlists are a great idea that often gets bogged down and limited by the fact that everyone has their own music service/platform of choice and there is generally no interoperability between them. Fred Wilson blogged on the topic, and the challenges, about a week ago. The problem is that most collaborative playlisting options require a lot of overhead... either everyone needs to join/use/switch to the same playlisting site or the creator of the playlist has to engage in a lot of manual labor to curate the playlist.

I talked a bit recently about how some service are already set up to handle the exact use cases that people are interested in, just that the other pieces of the puzzle haven't been put in place yet. By using the "web as the music catalog", listening data as automated search queries and free-range MP3s as the universally supported format, it is actually easy to create collaborative playlists with a combination of existing technologies that can all work on a common platform. Hashtags, Twitter Search (aka Summize), friendP3 and playTwitter.

To create a collaborative playlist, one just needs to manually post (or retweet a friendP3/meP3 link) with a playlist name as a hashtag. For example, I just started one with the name of #fp3Bestof2009 (where "fp3" stands for "friendP3"). I posted a couple of songs, and others can as well without any overhead required by me to manage. To see the collaborative playlist, I can use Twitter Search to search for that hashtag/playlist name.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fp3Bestof2009

Click on the playTwitter bookmarklet and you are off and listening to the community programmed list that continues to be dynamic over time. If you want to filter the playlist, you can simply use the "advanced search" fields of Twitter Search and you can limit posts/songs by contributor, date, keywords, and more. Find a filter you like, and then you could subscribe to the RSS feed for those filters and just watch what continues to come in from users across the web.

User friendly? Uh... nope, not yet. Powerful? I think so. What do you guys think?

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Radio @AmbientSignal

I've been publishing my meP3 stream out to a bunch of different platforms (e.g. FriendFeed, Tumblr, Soup.io) but the one that I'm most fond of right now is the Twitter station that I'm passively programming @ambientsignal. There are actually many parts of the experience that are substantially worse on Twitter than on the other platform - most notably the lack of an integrated media player - but you've got to go where the people are, right?! A quick addition (and hopefully future evolution) of playTwitter and StreamPad (shoutouts to both Lucas Gonze and Dan Kantor) could make this even more powerful.

While I was originally focused on constructing a station by crawling a single user's social graph, I've shifted focus a bit more to the simple aggregation of a users *own* stream. Each user can publish their own, then just simply follow the others they want. Where I think it could get really interesting is in Twitter clients. Each user could create their own "group stations" comprised of any single or collection of meP3 streams. Then just throw a small media player into those Air and iPhone apps and you've got a social listening and discovery service that I think would be as compelling as any out there. TweetDeck, Twirl, Twitterific, et al... are you out there? Not only does it power great content discovery (I've personally been exposed to at least 5 new bands that I like in as many days from @friendP3), but it would/will stimulate endless water cooler conversations around the content.

My friend Dave now is also powering his own Twitter station @ZprocketRadio. It's just starting to load up with tracks, but when I hear something I like I will inevitably reply to @ZprocketRadio with a 140 character note on what I think about it. He also has brought up some interesting ideas around the use of #hastags to power collaborative playlists that I may play around with today.

If anyone out there is interested in being one of the first stations (or wants to build a killer Twitter Radio client) drop me a line at jherskowitz (at) globallistic (dot) com and I'll help you out. It's still super-hacky and exceedingly geeky... but I'd be interested to see if a community evolves around this concept.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

@friendP3 - Add to Favorites Playlist

When you are just a guy trying to hack something together in your free time, you are quickly and constantly reminded to not reinvent the wheel. That, along with my complete lack of programming skills, forces me to brute force and re-purpose stuff wherever possible (see last 5 posts or so for proof).

The great thing about that, is it helps open my eyes to features/products out there they will perfectly handle the use case I'm looking to implement. The newest ephiphany is that Twitter's "favorite" feature is ideal for creating a playlist of favorite songs that you may hear on @friendP3 or any other "twitter radio" station (current or future).

A video speaks 10,000 words...

http://screencast.com/t/IHoNJ5kkL

(by the way, I *love* Jing's screencasting app but they fact that the videos aren't resizable is a major problem since they are all too big - dimensionally - to fit into my blog)

Monday, February 16, 2009

Now Playing: Twitter Radio

Image via CrunchBase

The latest ingredient in this grand mashup experiment I embarked on last week is what I'm calling (for lack of a better term right now) "Twitter Radio". The idea being that a user can either passively, or manually, program a soundtrack as a backchannel to their tweets. This can either be done for you personally - with links to songs you listen to systematically injected into your regular twitter account or into a secondary dedicated "radio" account. Also, collaborative "group stations" can be automagically programmed by the listening behaviors of one or more people and posted to a Twitter account.

For now, I'll probably use a secondary dedicated account (TBD) so I won't overwhelm everyone that follows me @jherskowitz. Once it's more stable maybe I'll integrate them... too bad Twitter doesn't have filters that could better handle this scenario.

To listen to one of these stations first-hand, you just need to do a few things:

Install the "playTwitter" bookmarklet from (http://www.gonze.com/playtwitter)
Go to @friendp3
Clock the playTwitter bookmarklet in your browser's link bar (after dragged there in step 1)

That's it... now you can listen to everything that shows up there. There is still plenty more I would like to have it do... but it's a start. And as with all things that I hack together, it will probably break more than once... but I'll try to fix the stuff as I can.

Confused? You could just watch this: http://screencast.com/t/DS1CwwoMw

Thursday, January 08, 2009

What the Hell Have I Been Up To?!

So, one of my last posts a month or so ago was... "I'm going to start blogging again". Well, it turns out I lied. After my time at Strands (formerly MyStrands), I thought I was going to take a few weeks off and catch my breath. But as supreme luck (and perhaps good karma) would have it, my dream gig landed landed in my lap about 24 hours into my psuedo-retirement. There has been a fair amount of speculation about what this new company is up to... some right, some wrong, but all compelling enough that I jumped at the chance to be part of it.

So, I quickly cranked through the extensive "honey do" list I had been assigned (involved lots of painting and fixing of stuff) and got back to work. And what a busy 6 weeks it has been so far. Those that follow me on Twitter (@jherskowitz) have probably seen me talking about numerous all-nighters as we've been hurtling towards unveiling ourselves to the public.

Drumroll please..... because here is. MY NEW PLAYLIST IS FINALLY DONE! :-P

Yes, that is what I believe those in the marketing world call a "tease". More info to come on what (and who) is behind all that made my new playlist possible soon. In the meantime, just enjoy some free and legal music above. There are some new albums that I've been really digging lately too, and I'll be posting more in the coming days/weeks. Enjoy.

Friday, May 09, 2008

tweetiaor

So, I built me*dia*or a while ago so I could drink from the music 2.0 firehose from a single place. As it was selfishly built to just make my life easier, I'm glad that a handful of others have seem to found it useful too. Although, I haven't done much to improve it lately, although that's the beauty of it I suppose... you don't have to since the content keeps you coming back.

But, yesterday I decided to get me*dia*or on to Twitter. Using twitterfeed I now @mediaor shooting me news updates to my phone every 30 minutes. A bit overwhelming at times, but many times I find that if things don't jump out at me every once in a while and say "look at me!" then I will often miss them as they float on by.

If you're like me... then I hope you get some use out of it. If you are like most of my friends and didn't understand more than 3 words above, then keep on moving... :-)

Friday, April 25, 2008

Reply Channels

Every once in a while, when I'm in a music rut and being lazy, I will just ask people for recommendations on what I should be listening to. Yeah, everybody does that, I know. But want I find interesting is the different modes in which the recommendations come in.

Take today for example... I tweeted (or is "twittered"?) the following:

Need some new music... what do you guys suggest?

Because of the multiple status broadcast and aggregation tools I use, that message found it's way to my Twitter account, Pownce account, Facebook status, FriendFeed (and other lifestreaming sites), and a number of other channels.

What I found interesting where the multiple modes of response I received.

public @replies via Twitter
direct Twitter replies
posts to my Facebook wall
private (inbox) messages via Facebook
messages from friends with links sent from their music site of choice
comments on a number of lifestream aggregators (to where my tweets get published)
instant messages
emails
and I'm guessing that I get some more recommendations from people via comments on this post

I find it to be a very interesting (and growing) phenomenon. What do you guys think? What's your preferred channel?

Monday, February 25, 2008

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

I realize I have been pretty sparse with my posts lately. I blame that on a couple of things...

1.) I have been using Twitter to more quickly (and granularly) express what I am thinking/doing.

2.) I've been very busy with work. We are starting to get close to with a new product, and that has been keeping me more than occupied. But, once we get closer I will probably get to the point where I won't shut up about it.

That being said, I'll be at the Digital Music Forum East conference tomorrow/Wednesday in New York. Let me know if any of you guys are going.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Twitter DJ by Foxytunes

Things have been a little hectic lately, and after read Fred Wilson's post on Twitter DJ the other day, I realized that I had forgotten to say anything about it myself.

Twitter DJ leverages Twitter as a human-powered recommendation channel. It was built by the guys at Foxytunes (which btw is a very slick little browser extension) and I was asked to be one of their “featured DJs”.

In their own words...

FoxyTunes Twitter DJ is a Twitter channel with music recommendations from a selected group of "FoxyTunes DJs".

Also, it allows all Twitter users to share their favorite songs with the community.
How do I post songs?

1. Add FoxyTunesDJ as your Twitter friend
2. Wait for a few moments until FoxyTunesDJ adds you back as a friend
3. Use TwittyTunes to post music to Twitter, prefixing it with "@FoxyTunesDJ". All music twits will appear right here on this page (http://www.foxytunes.com/twitterdj) - as well as showing up in each contributors Twitter status

Featured DJs:

Chris Messina

Fred Wilson

Jason Herskowitz

Ouriel Ohayon

Basically, when you click receive the Twitter message, they provide an URL for artists that resolve to their “FoxyTunes Planet” mashup (which pulls in YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Flickr and lots of other feeds). Also, when you visit either my DJ channel (or the aggregated channel), you can then listen to the songs I've recommended since they map them to YouTube videos. Voila... personalized radio that doesn't cost them anything to broadcast.

If this takes off for them it will generate a good number of page views for them without actually having to generate any content themselves. There is a growing trend of Music 2.0 services using freely available/licensed music videos to create "personalized radio stations". I'm not sure how this trend ultimately gets reconciled with the Streaming Radio Royalty Rates, but obviously more and more loopholes and workarounds pop-up everyday.

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