Shotbeak.com

Haven’t blogged in ages!

Just an update on various things.

Been heavily busy with my 3rd year. The second semester has been as expected packed academically, even more so than the 1st semester. It is more work, but this time I am more prepared. I am coping and loving most of the work. The marketing is especially quite challenging, but learning something new each day! That’s the way I like it. I can truly see how I am going to use my module on marketing research for plenty of things in my life.

I’ve also decided to continue studying next year. Going to do an honours in Socio-Informatics. Looking forward to it!

On to my projects:

Tweekly.fm

It’s going strong! It surpassed the 50 000 user mark earlier this month (and adding plenty of new users each month). It is incredible!

Twimemachine

Doing no marketing for it at all, yet it still gets picked up my social media ‘experts’, pumping the hits into the site. I’m actually looking to sell it. I have plenty of features I want to incorporate into it that I don’t have the time for. Let me know if you are interested.

Music

Been jamming it up, churning out tunes. My brother and I made an electro-house tune. Have a listen. It is called Dynasty. On the personal front, I’m coming closer to releasing an EP. There are 2 maybe 3 songs I feel is good enough to get some proper vocal treatment.

That’s it for now. Peace.

I haven’t blogged in a while. I would’ve used Twitter to vent my anger, but 140 chars is just too little.

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.

My entrepreneurship textbook is telling me that to in order to become more creative one should adopt a relational view of the world. A lot of new inventions arise because people see new relationships between objects and processes.

A pun is “the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words.”

In order to make puns one has to recognise the meaningful relationship between the words being used. And thus, making puns is a great way to develop your creativity.

So next time someone cringes because of your lame pun, revel in the thought that your next great idea might be a joke.

At first, I quite liked the redesign of Facebook. It put the status updates in your face. It was the the part of Facebook that I liked the most. It looks like Twitter now. It’s good coz I like Twitter.

But…

Facebook shouldn’t try and copy the Twitter way of doing things, because Facebook has too many other features going for it. Twitter is all about “status updates” (in the Facebook way of words), while Facebook is about status updates, walls, photos, groups, applications, etc.

In the past Facebook had the “news” feed which was ranked according to your “setttings” and popularity. It put the things on the front page that you might interesting while you were gone from Facebook. This is one of the features I would really like to have of Twitter.

I don’t have time to sit and stare at Twitter while the streams come in. So sometimes I miss interesting tweets and links. While I would like Twitter to have a feature where it shows the interesting and “popular” tweets since I was gone, there aren’t enough “interactions” and variables to give a great representation of what happened.

There are more interactions on Facebook and thus it can more effectively show you the “highlights”. The highlights tab on Facebook is their competitive advantage. They should think about perhaps emphasising the highlights tab again as it were when it was the News Feed.

What do you think?

So. Tweekly.fm, my last.fm and twitter mashup has almost 300 subscribers now. In order to pay for the hosting and other features I have in mind, I will have to try and start monetizing it.

There are 2 ways, through ads and premium services. I don’t really want to go into the “premium” service route. I’d rather develop more free features and try and drive more traffic to Tweekly.fm for ads.

The first biggest new feature will be a showcase page for your week’s most listened artists. So far, all that Tweekly.fm is doing, is show your top 3 artists without anything more. I COULD link to each last.fm band profile, but there isn’t enough space in a tweet. I’d rather create my own “landing” page for it.

From this showcase page, you’ll be able to see their top 3 artists for the week in a neat format with basic information about the artists. Alongside the info will be a link to the user’s last.fm profile.

This way I’ll be able to draw more traffic back to Tweekly.fm and better show your followers on Twitter what music you “actually” like.

When can you expect? Hmmm… Not too sure when. Could be soon (in a week), but at definitely before the end of April.

Keep listening.

So, I’ve had this concept in my head for quite some time. I’ve been holding it back in the fear that someone might “steal” it. I don’t have enough resources and time to devote to a project like this. If it’s a great idea and someone does use it, then yay. I’m somewhat a communist (if that’s even the right word) when it comes to ideas. If my idea is used by someone else and I can use it, although it makes that someone else rich, I don’t care.

If we think how we have been organising information on the web, it has been done through metadata such as tags. It is simple keywords that describes larger pieces of data. It has been very very useful to say the least.

So, it got me thinking. Why can’t one extend the idea to degree of “tagging” people? We ARE becoming apart of this new web. Why not start tagging us for ease of use? This way, we can much more easily meet the people we WANT to meet.

I like to call it matterdata. Matterdata is the extra pieces of information that define who WE are. Matterdata is the metadata of humans.

Now how will we tag people? There is a new site that is starting with this “process” called socialwhois which I blogged about before. You are allowed to define your own matterdata. While I like this concept, I think matterdata should be assigned by what we do: by our everyday interactions.

Our everyday interactions can’t easily be integrated into the online world (not yet). It should be defined stuff like “keywords” in your Twitter, your most listened to artists on last.fm, the groups you are in on Facebook, the photo tags from Flickr, the videos you liked on YouTube, etc.

Ideally, in the future, there should be more points of “interaction” or gateways where everyday data can be fed into this cloud to better define who you are. Spend lots of time at a local coffee shop? Buy lots of car magazines? There is no way to gather this matterdata.

My idea, is to create such a site that gathers all this “current” matterdata from sites and then try and develop websites/technologies to gather more matterdata. My ultimate goal with this site is so that if we move around this global world, we can much more easily integrate with our local society/environment. Although we think globally, we are still local creatures. With this matterdata, it could easily compare you to the people are most like you in your immediate and global surroundings.

Won’t that be a much more enriching, fulfilling and human experience?