Tweekly.fm struggling
Tags: last.fm, tweeklyfm, twitter
So, there has been interesting developments lately in the Tweekly.fm stable. Stable is actually the wrong word, because it is exactly what it is not.
It has been growing way too fast to keep it contained. It now has 13 000 users. My hosting company has been on my back for quite some time now, because I’m overloading the servers each time the tweets send. Thanks to the helpful @igitur, I have a pretty solid way of optimising the code/script. Unfortunately, as it is primarily the process of fetching data from last.fm that is slow, it is a losing battle. Inevitable down the line, I’ll keep running into optimisation problems.
I am not entirely sure where to go with Tweekly.fm at the moment. If I continue the service, I’ll have to upgrade, get its own server, get advertisers, et al in order to keep it running as it is running now. The problem with this method is that 1) I’m a full-time student. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on Tweekly.fm (which is why I haven’t actually optimised the script at all) and 2) Tweekly.fm is a mashup after all. I didn’t start it in the beginning to make money from it. It was purely a service I wanted, and thought other people would maybe enjoy. Monetising a mashup is a very iffy thing. I’m totally at mercy of Twitter and Last.fm (especially last.fm).
At the end of the day, I’m providing a service based off of last.fm. They could easily implement the Tweekly.fm feature and then I have to shut down everything. I don’t own any of the data, etc. I also don’t really have any right to this “IP” if you understand what I mean. I merely provide the conduit for the flow of data.
Which brings me to the question: do I want this? I don’t want to make a full fledged enterprise mashup. Should I go ahead with monetising and upgrading everything? Is there a way I can keep it “small” without incurring too much server problems?
Should I change the way Tweekly.fm works (less bandwidth)? There are still more social-twitter side features I can add (which I want to). Should I perhaps move it to manual tweeting? and then pay for automatic tweeting? Or spread it out across the week (user can choose when to send it)?
All these questions are plaguing me, and I don’t know where to go. After my university exams (starting next week), I’ll probably have to switch Tweekly.fm temporarily off, think about what I want to do with it, fix whatever needs fixing and take it from there.
What do you say?
Why is my tweekly.fm so late?
Tags: tweeklyfm
I am seeing more and more people complaining that their Tweekly.fm isn’t working only to see their profiles updated later. A trend I see is that people revoke access, because they think their Tweekly.fm isn’t working, but it was working, the people only had to wait.
The problem with Tweekly.fm at the moment is that it has become slightly too big for what it was in the beginning. It has almost 11 000 users now and the script is taking about 5 hours to send. That means that tweets are spread out, by the order in which you signed up, over 5 hours. So you might think that your Tweekly.fm isn’t working, but you should just be patient… for now.
I’m currently in the process of speeding up the script. If push comes to shove, I can always optimise the script, parallelize it, add more computing power, but in the end, it’s actually a “broken” system. Down the line, it will eventually become too much. If I went all “start-up” on this, I could perhaps do it, but Tweekly.fm is a hobby project that I must manage.
So, I’m thinking of ways of changing the way Tweekly.fm works. With the new redesign, it should work perfectly. My main idea is making Tweekly.fm “manual”. Click a button and a tweet will be sent, just as it is now. If you want to auto-tweet, you must make a donation and then be able stipulate at what time your tweekly.fm tweet should run. This way, I can spread out the tweets and gather more money to pay for faster servers.
For now, I think it is a win-win situation.
Tell me what you think.
P.S. Advertising could also pay for the servers. 400k pageviews. 22k unique visitors. 400k alexa. You know you want to. 
Tweekly.fm – Growing Pains
Tags: donate, hosting, tweeklyfm
It took 8 months for the first 5000 users. It took 1,5 months for the next 5000. Yes, Tweekly.fm is now serving just under 10 000 music loving Twitter users. Thank you very much. 20k unique visits, 385k pageviews (according to awstats) and a 430k alexa rank. I can see why:
“i am adding tweekly.fm and i must say i’m very excited about it’s existence, what a treat”
“tweekly.fm might be the best thing ever. and it’s saturday night. i am a loser.”
“haha, yeah, thanks. 
tweekly.fm just rules. :p”
“gives me a reason to start using Last.fm again. Nice service”
“Love this service. So cool to see everyones tweets on Saturday!”
And the roller coaster ride is just beginning! It’s growing so fast, I can’t keep up. Tweekly.fm is on a shared server at the moment, and I’m overloading it every time I send the tweets. I’ve been trying to figure what causes it the whole week. I tested the script again and again, and it turns out it was the XML that was slowing the whole script. It can’t be last.fm’s side of things (unless they are limiting calls without any notice), so it is definitely on my side of things.
I’m still in contact with my hosting provider. It could either be the fact that server to server transfer is rather slow. I’m still going to try and optimise the script.
But, this basically means the inevitable. I’m going to have to switch to a dedicated solution for Tweekly.fm some time soon. I can’t contain Tweekly.fm’s growth. In order to maintain efficient service, I might have to stop new sign-ups and if push comes to shove, I might also have to stop sending tweets until I can figure it all out. My problem with Tweekly.fm is, is that it’s a part-time project. Luckily my studies are taking a nice dip this coming weeks before the exams, so I’ll try my best to figure it all out so that all you people can just continue listening and sharing your top artists. (new design coming soon too)
If I have to move to a dedicated solution, I’ll have to gather some investment or at least get some dedicated advertisers to maintain it. The current advertising (only adsense) covers costs only just. It won’t cover a dedicated server (385k pageviews. contact me for advertising).
Because I don’t have a solid income (studying) to support Tweekly.fm, I have to rely on advertising. I’ll have to think real hard where I’m going with this. I might have to include a premium part to keep it all running.
For now I must wait and hear what my hosting company is going to say. Till then you can support Tweekly.fm by either advertising on the River Brothers network or donate through paypal (go to www.tweekly.fm. The donate button is on the front page).
Every little help is appreciated!
But most of all! Just keep listening!
Tweekly.fm server issues
Tags: hosting, tweeklyfm, twitter
So, Last.fm upgraded this weekend, which meant I had to reschedule Tweekly.fm. I decided on Monday 12pm GMT. The script started sending, only to cut out after 6minutes. A few minutes I get a message from my hosting company telling me I overloaded the server… Odd. It turns, I’ve been overloading the server every time, but because today’s Tweekly.fm run was in peak times, they had to stop the script.
So today, only 260 tweets were sent. Sorry about that! I’m going to optimise the script and send the rest of the tweets after-hours tonight. Your tweets are coming! Don’t worry!
It will be interesting to see how the optimisation will pan out, considering that I’m going to cut down on LOADS of SQL queries.
Sorry for the inconvenience! Tweekly.fm will resume it’s normal “time” this week. Saturday night GMT time.
Changing Times
Tags: tweeklyfm
So last.fm is performing upgrades this weekend, which means I have to push Tweekly.fm to another time.
Tweekly.fm currently starts at 11PM (GMT +2) which means that its 9PM GMT and 5PM in New York and and 2PM in San Francisco. United States currently constitutes 90% of my traffic (yes that much). I wonder if it is because USA has the greatest cross section of twitter and last.fm users? I think it is mainly because the tweets have been sending in their “twitter” time, if you know what I mean…
So as an experiment, I’m going to run Tweekly.fm on Monday (because of the upgrade) on 12:00 GMT to see what Europe does.
Will be interesting to see the traffic changes. I think it will probably drop (more traffic from USA, means even more traffic from USA). Who knows, maybe it doesn’t change at all?
In the future, I guess I’ll have to make it so that each user can send theirs on their own time for maximum exposure… That is further down the development roadmap. But first, I’ll have to finish my currently new planned features for Tweekly.fm.
Tweekly.fm hits 7500 users
Tags: imsonerdy, Music, tweeklyfm
I just actually needed a cool blog-title.
This blog is more just an update on the state of things.
Firstly, yes: Tweekly.fm has of this blog post hit 7500 users. It is also now under 500 00 on alexa ranking. It has grown tremendously the past few months. I am very happy about it! What started as just a simple service I wanted to use on my own in January of this year, is now supporting itself through ad revenue! That is not all though. I am going to upgrading and overhauling the Twitter side of the mashup in the coming month if university work isn’t bogging me down too much. Expect awesome features!
Twindie.net run by me and my bro (well my bro does more work atm) got a redesign and launched its first T-shirt range! It’s dry and lame.
I’m So Nerdy is going slowly at the moment. I’m sensing a redesign possibly and the eventual implementation of categories (and better sharing), but it is a bit low on the priority list. Too much other web and study-related things we are busy with. But please, don’t stop submitting hilarious nerdyness.
We also have a new website in the pipeline that should launch in the coming weeks. We love it.
In music-related news, we are busy with an EP for our project, called Dapper Jump. Expect it to sound like indie alternative rock with electro.
Yes, me and my brother are trying to take over the world.
Tweekly.fm FAQ
Tags: tweeklyfm
Having problems with Tweekly.fm? Here is the FAQ.
Tweekly.fm didn’t work? Help?
If your twitter did not send a sign-up tweet, Tweekly.fm won’t work. First make sure of that. Secondly, Tweekly.fm takes about 2 hours to send all the tweets. If you sign up during the “tweet”-run, you signed up too late. You will only get a tweet the following week.
I revoked access, but I want to use it again. How do I sign up again?
There is only one way to do this. Mail me personally at sdlrouviere at gmail dot com. For security purposes, I do not store your twitter username, only your last.fm username. I can’t help you, unless you send me your last.fm username.
If you have any other questions: ask in the comments, and I’ll add it here.
Is my knowledge being reduced to pointers?
Tags: google, technology, wikipedia
After studying for a test this past week, I reaffirmed a theory of mine. It’s not technically a theory. It is already happening, and I think most people can agree.
I have to remember about 300 pages for a test. I’ve realised how I remember the knowledge. I remember where the information and even sometimes how the data was structured on the page, but I couldn’t remember the details. To me, it feels like the pointers to memory that are used in computers.
I feel that our generation, driven by the internet (Google and Wikipedia) where we have a wealth of information at our fingertips start to think about our knowledge in a different way. We don’t make the effort to remember all the data, but rather only remember where to get it, once we need it.
So in essence, my knowledge is being reduced to a bank of pointers of which Google and Wikipedia are the most important (Wolfram to a lesser extent).
In the past, it could’ve existed to a lesser extent, ie just go to the library to get your information, but the effort required was much greater. To me it is apparent that it is becoming more profound.
Is it good or bad? I’d say, it’s a natural progression for the merging of humans and technology. I’m no expert on “brain power”, but it seems obvious that we don’t to spend too much time to remember it all, but rather spending time on applying our knowledge.
Why news should be free
Tags: news, rupert murdoch
Rupert Murdoch wants you to pay for online news.
*facepalm*
That’s what I did. Seriously. News is news is news. You shouldn’t pay for it.
Before the internet, we paid for newspapers to get the news. Why? It makes sense to me, that we did it because we paid for the physical product. We paid for the paper the articles were written on, we paid for the distribution and we paid for the writers. If newspapers didn’t exist, news would still spread, but it would be through word of mouth. That’s as free as it can get. Newspapers could charge money for bringing news together in a physical product and then making it slightly more reputable.
When TV came along, news became even more free. We simply had to pay for the TV subscription. No real need to buy newspapers. Both of these mediums had ads to support them. Many eyes saw TV and print ads.
Now the internet came along, further minimalising the opportunity costs for news. With the internet, news became democratized. We could share news by just lifting our fingers. This also meant that news sites saw countless eyes on their pages, further increasing ad revenue.
The internet closed the time and space for news to spread. The internet is word of mouth news without the space and time restrictions. Why should someone monopolise something that happens? No one owns news.
News sites shouldn’t expect us to pay for it: not in this age. Your advantage as a news site is the eyes that read the pages. If you limit that, the news will inevitably spread through other channels.
That’s my opinion at least. Who agrees with me? Am I missing something?
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