Shotbeak.com

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!

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.

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

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.

I keep forgetting that this blog is also about my music endeavours! I just keep posting about my websites and such.

Me and brother, who each have our own music projects (see pages above for my stuff and Sparkyboy on MySpace for my bro’s 8-bit music), has decided to finally put something together with vocals.

We didn’t go out to make it a live band. We just want to make music because we like doing it. If that means adding loads of electronic stuff, then so be it. We also don’t try to subscribe to any genre, rather just make music when it sounds cool.

Considering that my bro is in China, we could only make about 3 tunes so far. “We Are In Space” is what I like to call ghetto, space synth. “Bears” is indie dance rock-y and “Sands of Tide” is an ambient electro tune.

Go check us out on MySpace. More songs are coming eventually!