The web game of sharing music
Tags: last.fm, Music, share, twitter
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”.
—–
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
Twimemachine.com – Browse your old tweets
Tags: old, tweets, twimemachine, twitter
So my oldtweets app has gotten feet of its own. Without any marketing, it’s been gaining traction thanks to tweets, blogs and google juice. I decided to get it onto its own domain and make a new interface.
So, I present Twimemachine.com. It’s old tweets, but kinda better. Think oldtweets 1.2. 
So, if you want to browse your old tweets with a simple interface, go to twimemachine.com and browse away!
Yes, twitter still doesn’t allow third party developers to browse past 3200 tweets.
Got any question, just post here. I’m also hosting a competition. I want a nifty “novel app” frontpage design, so anyone who thinks they can design a neat frontpage, can have a link to their website on the frontpage.
Tweekly.fm: a year on. Now what?
Tags: last.fm, tweeklyfm, twitter
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.
Tweekly.fm – Donation Drive
Tags: last.fm, server, tweeklyfm, twitter
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.
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?
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.
And Twitter saves the day!
Tags: twitter
I find it exciting to see the way Twitter is being used as a communication form. From breaking news (such as the Hudson river plane incident) and the way it is being used as a means for a revolution (like the Iran election).
Twitter’s leaked documents states it wants to become the “pulse of the planet” and it is indeed succeeding in accomplishing that!
Today, a fellow South African (@CraigN, Blog), further affirmed this point.
Craig was robbed and unfortunately for him, the robbers brought along a cellphone jammer. Using Twitter, he managed to DM a friend to call the cops.
Luckily, Craig is safe and the cops are busy tracking down the culprit.
Lets look back at my predictions
Tags: facebook, twitter, wow, YouTube
It is just past the haflway mark for 2009. I made some predictions in the beginning of the year. Lets see if they came true:
1. A comedic web series following wannabe Guitar Hero rockstars will rock YouTube.
Nope, haven’t seen anything spectacular in that line. Cmon you video’sters! Create a funny spinal tap-like script for guitar hero rockstars. Do it!
2. People fooled by The Onion will decrease even more.
Yes, The Onion’s traffic rank has risen through the year.
3. Blizzard will send the gaming population crazy with another witch hunt.
Blizzcon is at the end of August, so we shall see when that times.
4. More gullible people join Facebook and send spam mail detailing how your account will be deleted if you don’t send the message to 10 people.
Yes. I don’t want to talk about this. It makes me sad. Really.
5. Global warming sends much needed moisture for cloud computing to create a storm.
Basically, cloud computing will get a boost in 2009. It just DID! With the announcement of Google OS! I also predicted a Google OS back in January 2007. Oh yes, I did.
6. Digg posts a link to itself, crashing the site.
Doesn’t work. 
7. World of Warcraft reveals API to get data out of it. (twitter indundated by “orgath dinged lvl 45?)
Not entirely. TweetCraft a 3rd-party WoW twitter client does something in that line. It has a very laborious installation procedure, so Twitter is still safe-ish for now.
8. Google reveals location based ads placed on busses. (ie bus rides past a bar, and an ad pops up showing how cheap the beer is in that bar).
Not yet. The technology doesn’t exist yet.
9. Parents have to start deciding when to allow their young’uns access to their Facebook profiles. Is Young Johnny ready too see mommy in a drunk photo?
Not yet such a big issue, but parents are joining facebook and are making a fool of themselves. <- Great site.
10. dotCommunism gains a few more members.
I think people are beginning to realise that the way things are currently run in the world ain’t exactly working anymore.
——
p.s. How awesome is Google Chrome OS? Bring on the cloud!
Twitter, please mix basic auth with OAuth.
Today, I spent close to 6 hours trying to implement a workable solution to running OAuth alongside my current basic authentication for Tweekly.fm. I got close to getting it working.
Yes, OAuth is great. But it is not great when you already have userbase of basic auth users. My problem is that IF I do implement OAuth, I’d want Tweekly.fm users to come back and switch. It’s a nightmare, since Tweekly.fm isn’t exactly a service where you use your login credentials again. I’d somehow have to get all the users to come back to switch. The only thing connecting OAuth with basic auth in my system is the last.fm username. Because of the way Tweekly.fm works, I can’t run both OAuth and basic auth. So, if someone wants to switch, I have to delete the basic auth, which is just too much effort for the user. Because the way Tweekly.fm works, I might also end up deleting another person’s subscription (you can choose any last.fm username, not just your own).
All I ask Twitter, is 1 special API method. Use basic auth to get the access tokens. This way, I can easily switch my whole userbase to OAuth without them having to do ANYTHING! You can even deprecate all the other functions of basic auth. Just allows us to get access tokens if we use basic auth.
It will even drop all the hurdles to get authorization in the 1st place (go to site, click, authorize on twitter, come back). Desktop apps will like this too. This way, you keep the ease of basic auth and have the security of OAuth (switching off rogue apps). The user won’t be phased. The developers might have trouble though. Basic auth is much better to learn than OAuth.
So, Twitter, if you want to switch to OAuth, at least make it easier for us to switch existing userbases to it.
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