Shotbeak.com

After song.ly’s recent bid (for $50 000) and my own interest in web and music (http://www.tweekly.fm), I decided to delve into the host of services that aim to “share music” and more specifically to twitter.

Some of the more popular streaming sites like “imeem” that died allowed you to post tweets from it, but I’m rather looking at sites specifically built for this purpose.

So here is the list in order of alexa rank (as of this post):

blip.fm – 4,449

It’s strongest feature is its first mover advantage. Started before most other services and although it claims to be “twitter for music”, it sees Twitter as a distribution channel, not its main feature. Decent service, nice backing. Used it some time ago, but haven’t really after that.

twiturm.com – 59,319

“Twiturm.com is the easiest way to socialize your music. Created for the artist, Twiturm is to be used as a promotional tool to promote their music.” TWIT Ur Music. Used more as promotional tool. P.S. They should get rid of the easter background. Really hurts my eyes.

tweetmysong.com - 143,567

Almost missed this one. Like twiturm. Post YOUR music. Very easy to do. Kudos for that. Still uses basic auth and has no twitter account??

song.ly – 189,228

Simple and sleek. Embedded player. Competitive advantage is its various ways to easily post songs (API) and integration into several twitter apps.

twt.fm – 189,563

Very similar to song.ly. Has API, searches for songs, has userpages that looks like twitter. Love the design (in fact most of Lee Martin’s designs). Simplistic. Competitive advantage. 1,600,00+ followers. Tweet a popular song: get lots of RT, get lots of traffic. Simple.

swift.fm – 209,969

Uses twitter “to help you discover, share and enjoy new music”. Focus is on friends. Very much infused with twitter. It is a lot like Blip.fm in a way, but also allows you to upload your own songs. Seen few comments of people switching to swift.fm because of that reason. One to watch.

bln.kr – 250,630

Also very simplistic. Focuses on sharing YOUR music, much like twiturm.com.

twtmuzik.net – 305,412

Same thing. Share mp3′s on twitter. Don’t like the design (bit broken in chrome). Also no twitter account?

twones.com – 310,987

They aren’t really clear exactly what it does. Joined a while ago in the invite stage. Now that I came back, its different and focused on the music bar. Aims to “bookmark” music on the web. Sounds interesting. It can scrobble to last.fm which helps! They should watch out for extension.fm (looks mighty awesome!) though.

tweekly.fm – 349,396

My site, run with Scott. Can’t be too biased here. Core service: Share your last.fm top weekly artists. Very reliable on twitter and last.fm. Mashup. More interesting features coming soon.

tinysong.com – 354,484

Grooveshark powered music sharing tool. Pretty simple. Did some hunting and actually found out it was created by the marketing director of Grooveshark. Nice. Has an API too.

maestro.fm – 358,503

Still don’t know where to position them. Let the blurb on the site speak for itself. “stored your music in the cloud, share and discover”. You must download a maestro connector to connect to your home PC. You basically play your songs through the web. They should put the FAQ on the frontpage. I had to figure out what it does.

twisten.fm – 1,095,911

Listen to Twitter. Powered by Grooveshark. So basically, you aren’t using a service to ‘tweet’ it. Was popular, but dropping. Don’t know why they still have basic auth. Team also incorporates the marketing director of Grooveshark. Looks like he has hand in some music sharing pie. I wonder if he bid for song.ly.

songtwit.com, swg.fm – > 1,600,000

Both of these, I find hard to distinguish. Simple, but much better services out there.

imusictweet.com – 4,492,053

Surprised I found this. Launched 30th of March. “Share and stream songs or playlists for free”. More like song.ly and twt.fm than swift.fm and blip.fm. Struggling to find how it differentiates from the other offerings. Don’t like the design that much.

listento.fm > 5,000,000

Not directly “linked” to twitter through authentication. Interesting system, but ultimately laborious. Too many steps to tweet a song. listento.fm creates a page to “listen to it” by the whatever way your provided the link, but you have to post the link yourself. One can just post a link to the youtube video or mp3 itself?

tweetmylast.fm – 7,658,433

Very blah. “It’s just a way to annoy your followers on twitter with what you last.fm is tracking”.

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So yeah. That’s my list I scoured the net for. I think I found most of them. Also, thanks to twitdom for finding the ones google didn’t. Let me know if there is more.

I also created a twitter list for most the sites’ twitter accounts. Here it is: http://twitter.com/shotbeak/sharemusic

So, it will almost be Tweekly.fm’s first birthday soon (if I remember correctly Jan 7). The past few weeks has been hectic, juggling through servers, coding ducktape to keep it together, seeing it fall apart (AGAIN), and so forth.

Due to monetary and time constraints, I had to get up a watered-down version of Tweekly.fm: It only works manually. You enter your data and click send. As easy as that.

When I come back in January, things will hopefully start working again as it should (tweeting automatically). While last.fm did not want to buy Tweekly.fm, there is something else in the pipeline that will get Tweekly.fm back to its (automatic tweeting) glory it had a month ago. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later.

Sorry for the inconvenience guys! Thanks for the year as well!

And remember, keep listening.

So. Tweekly.fm is failing. It is growing too fast for a newbie solo developer like me.

I started it in the beginning of the year with next to no development experience. I still don’t have any legit development experience apart from hacking together MySQL and PHP with ducktape. This past few weeks has been an insanely hectic ride for Tweekly.fm!

First, I moved away from my current shared hosting to Mediatemple’s (dv) which completely failed on me. It hit the memory cap from all the traffic that was coming in. This week, I moved to Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, I’m really impressed with the service. It could keep up with traffic really well, until I realised it had a hard cap on its .php scripts of 15min, which meant instant fail for my completely inefficient script.

I’m at a loss with what to do now. I realise the way I’m doing it now, simple just won’t work with the resources I have. I’m currently busy with a redesign, but I can’t keep the current Tweekly.fm up and running efficiently.

Considering that I am still a full-time student, I can’t spend all my time developing it.

So from next week unfortunately, Tweekly.fm will not be automated anymore. It will only work manually. You enter your data, you tweet. I will work to the best of my ability behind the scene to get it back to automated form when it is possible.

There is also another way to keep Tweekly.fm going… Get last.fm to buy Tweekly.fm. This way, the automation can occur with real ease on super slick servers and better programmers making it great.

If you would like that, I would appreciate an RT.

Apologies to those who like their Tweekly.fm to be automated.

In the past year, Tweekly.fm has grown tremendously and for a full-time student like me, I don’t have the money and time to keep Tweekly.fm alive. I have a long holiday ahead of me in which I will revamp, redesign en redevelop Tweekly.fm, but in order to sustain its growth, I need to get it onto a dedicated server.

I don’t have the funds and the banner on top here will barely cover the costs of hosting a dedicated server.

In the past week I’ve received generous donations, thank you very much! I don’t want to resort to having sign-ups be donationware, so I ask you, Tweekly.fm user, please donate any amount. I plan to attain only $1000. If only a quarter of you pay $1 it will be more than enough!

All the money will go towards paying the hosting in the upcoming year.

As a reward the person who donated the most will receive a permanent thank-you on the frontpage of the new Tweekly.fm.

Click here to go to the donation page.

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?

After seeing Tweekly.fm in action, @jherskowitz, decided to make a similar service, but for songs. It uses Yahoo Pipes to do its work.

What’s great about it, is that you can pull the data in various forms, like RSS or PHP. As you can see on jherskowitz blog, he embedded it and uses Streampad to play the songs right from his blog.

Not exactly like Tweekly.fm for songs, but very similar! Enjoy!