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A few months ago, I decided it is time to sell TwimeMachine. The code, 2 years old and ducktaped to hell, was breaking. Random errors kept slipping in. Instead of working to fix it, I rather wanted to just sell it and work on something new. Just as I started looking for buyers, the ad revenue and traffic shot up. I was rather busy and couldn’t fix it. Time went on and I had to relearn Django for test. Opting to kill two birds with one stone, I recoded TwimeMachine in Django.

As per usual, when I start a new app/web idea I try do it in a new language, with new architecture, whatever. Just something new I can learn. So, I opted to learn how Heroku works as well Amazon’s S3 for serving static files. It was quite a learning experience, learning how to set up virtual environments for Python and getting Heroku to work together.

So, what’s new? Feature-wise. Nothing new. But I have coded in such a way to easily add new features. I am probably going to add a once-off premium service in the feature that will enable users to download their tweets, read @mentions and read hashtags. When that will, I don’t know. Architecture-wise, it is running on Heroku and serving static files from S3. Will see how it pans out. I still have no clue how to determine when to scale to more dynos. Apparently one dyno can handle between 10-50 requests a second, which amount at 10 requests a second to about 864 000 requests a day. So far I’m well within that range.

Heroku offers 750 free hours, which if I am thinking about this correctly, amounts to 31 days of constant requests (at 1 request per second). That amounts to +- 2.6 million requests per month. My calculations might be wrong. If I am, please correct me. I’ve tried googling for these stats, but haven’t found any. As for S3, it should basically be free.

So currently, I’m running it all for free. Which is awesome! Lastly, I have set up opt-out following of @twimemachine. I get around 300-600 uniques a day. So hopefully I can build some traction from that into my Twitter account. Currently, nothing on TwimeMachine has any traction. There are no network effects or anything being stored (atm), so I’m relying on that to build up some value.

So, go to TwimeMachine and have fun reading your old tweets. And remember, it is not cool to live in your past.

If there are any errors, do let me know.

Cheers!

As you might know. Music is my second passion after the web. If I am not studying or making websites, I am making music and going to gigs. I have plenty of music-related stuff to share with what I’ve been busy with.

A new post of mine is up on Bandwidthblog, in which I talk about Facebook and Spotify. Gist: They are on the right track. What I’ve found with automatic sharing with Tweekly.fm is very much in line with what will make Facebook and Spotify a success. Go read it to see why.

A music video!

I made this a while ago in July, but never managed to share it. It’s for one of my songs, called Move Along.

It was shot with my HTC. It will be title track of a new EP I am working on (will include vocals). The intention of the EP will be to fund myself an iPad 2, so I can start jamming some live gigs with it connected to my Mac to Ableton. I’ve always wanted to do a gig, but I found it incredibly boring and not worth anyone’s time to just stand and press play. Ableton connected to a midi-controller will add some live elements to it. Look at TouchAble. Here is an example:

Awesome! Here is a snippet of another song that will be on it.

Some gazey WIP by Simon Segfault

Finally, I’ve started playing around with Node.js again. Expect a real-time music related application soon. Quite excited about this. I have no idea how it will turn, but I guess that’s what makes it exciting as well.

And finally. Keep listening!

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P.S. On non-music related note. TwimeMachine is now officially up for sale. Contact me if you are interested.

Just an update on what I’ve been busy with during August.

I joined github!

I’ve been following some projects (making little changes here and there). I’ve also uploaded SimpleRest, a simple JSON based PHP REST server. It’s not much, but it shows the flow when REST is used. I will probably add more to it in the future and probably make a blogpost about it. I like github. It really sparked my interest in open source. It is so easy to edit, commit and send a pull request to small open source projects. Someone cloned my small project and it is exciting to think people are using my code (even if they are just looking at it and think that it sucks). Expect more open source stuff from me in the future.

I wrote a blogpost on bandwidthblog, detailing OS X Lion’s interface and spitballing why Apple chose to make it look more like iOS. I also wrote a post on the MIH Medialab blog on the power of APIs.

For Cape Town’s creative week, there was a competition to  create an electronic remix of Cape Jazz (or Ghoema). I made a fun, upbeat groovy kwaito version. Go look on my soundcloud and dance with. The winners still has to be announced.

I recently updated my linkedin profile that has been stagnating. Add me on there.

In TwimeMachine news, it has been doing surprisingly well! It is now almost netting 150 000 pageviews a month! The ad revenue is rather good as well. Speculations on the rise in ad revenue is probably due to the site breaking often. The code is horrible and I haven’t had time to fix it up properly. In times of peak traffic, it kind of breaks. I’ve been looking at options to speed up development of TwimeMachine (un-breaking it, adding features, etc), one of them which includes selling it. If someone wants to take over the reigns and push it further, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Tweekly.fm is also continuing as usual, netting a few thousand users each month. Exciting things are happening. Stay tuned!

I’ve started contributing to Bandwidthblog, so you might see more of my web/tech related musings appear on there. Two of the recent posts are:

Should I use Google+?

I really believe the system is flawed. Go read and see why.

Should Wikipedia’s Search be improved?

This is a response to Greplin’s challenge to improve Wikipedia’s search.

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Apart from that. I am busy developing my API at the MIH Medialab. Thoroughly enjoying the environment and I’m spending most of my coding time now on completing a prototype!

New York is planning a digital strategy. One of these components is running the ‘government as a platform’.

“We can help to create ecosystems the same way that the Facebook and the Twitter APIs have created entire ecosystems of tools and products and experiences that are deeply integrated. Every municipal government and different types of public services has the same potential, which is that you can open up — through an API — the information and services that the city provides. Then you can allow everyone to engage with the city on their own terms.”

This is quite exciting! Being somewhat of a technotarian, it will be really interesting to see what becomes of this. I hope interesting mashups will rise up to better the life of a New Yorker (and hopefully set the trend for other cities and countries).

When I was a child, my mother used to (and still does) make the yummiest soup. I also quite enjoyed dipping some bread into the soup: so much so, that on occasion I would play around and dip two-three slices into it, effectively rendering the soup useless. Too much bread.

Omnomnomnom

Did I expect the soup to turn a congealed wheat? Not at first of course. With my young mind, I knew I liked bread. I liked soup. I liked bread and soup and stuffed some more bread into the soup. That’s how I am starting to feel about Facebook. I keep adding friends; friends keep adding me. And it is starting to fill up, becoming noisy and bloated. Why is that happening? Dunbar’s Number, my friend. Dunbar’s Number.

Robin Dunbar's book. Read it.

Dunbar’s number (proposed by Robin Dunbar) is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. What is that number? 150. It has surprisingly shown up in a lot of real-world examples (from nomadic tribes to modern day factory floors). I was wondering if this would apply to online-relationships. Considering that Facebook is about ‘connecting with people you care about’, the data reveals a surprisingly similar trend. Facebook’s stats show that the average amount of Facebook friends are… drum roooll. 130.

Now, I’ve spoken about this in the past. Today, it is becoming more apparent as Facebook’s active users in the USA has dwindled by 6 million users. Maybe it is just a seasonal trend, a momentary dip, or maybe it is indicative of a greater problem? Facebook doesn’t know what to do about this increasing bloat.

People change. You aren’t that great of friends with some of your highschool buddies. You are however, adding more and more people on Facebook, without actually dumping some of them off. Facebook has only been around for the majority of its users for 2-3 years.

Now move forward a few years, and people will have changed. They will have new people who are more important in their lives. This means, Facebook’s average friends count will keep growing.

How has Facebook battled with this? They have recently (and silently) slipped in controls for the news feed that show only people you most interact with. The odd thing is, it doesn’t run across all devices that way! If you have Facebook for Android, you will notice a lot more updates that doesn’t appear in your web feed (m.facebook.com is the same as the web feed). Does it work. Not really. It sucks in a certain way to determine what I deem important. Just because I don’t interact much with a person/band, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in my feed.

So. What now?

Good question. One which I’ve been following quite avidly since my previous post about it. People will keep dipping their bread into their soup. Facebook needs to change if it wants to fend off against this impending problem. Either they find a way to beat the 150 number, by changing the way we communicate and stay in touch, or a new social contender comes to the fore that keeps your connections to under 150 (via some implicit social graph machine).

Suffice to say, I am definitely keeping an eye on this! All this talking about soup has made me hungry.