The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘appreciation’

I do a lot of watch writing but I rarely tell you good people where to start your own collection. In a new series (or maybe not), I present to you something that we support unconditionally.

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We Support Unconditionally: The Poor Man’s Watch Forum

Next week, 1200 indie (and not-so-indie) rock bands will descend upon New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon. Keeping up with all the bands playing at bars and clubs across the city, and who is going to which shows, can be a daunting task even for the most dedicated hipsters. But not to fear, SuperGlued just launched a free iPhone app (iTunes link) with all the CMJ music show listings (and more) that lets you see Tweets about each show, Tweet out your own messages, and share pictures you take via the app.

The launch is timed for CMJ, but it works anywhere. The app pulls in show listings from Last.fm, Livenation, local show listings, and those added by members. The app lets you indicate that you are going to a particular show.

It also lets you gawk at other people at shows, by snapping pictures and sharing them through the app, or checking out Tweets about that show. It acts as a Twitter client as well, letting you Tweet to your friends whether or not a show is worth coming out to, or just to show your appreciation for a particularly rocking song. (The rock-show Tweet is the digital equivalent of holding up a lighter, I guess). Each Tweet is accompanied with a short link to that show’s listing page on SuperGlued (like this one) , which also shows who else is going.

SuperGlued was founded by Rush Doshi, an ex-AOL product developer, and Tom Plunkett, who’s day job appropriately enough is as the CTO of Gawker. Perhaps that’s where the virtual voyeurism comes from.

On the one hand, it’s seems pretty silly to be looking down at your iPhone when you are at alive show instead of enjoying the band (unless the band sucks). On the other hand, it’s probably easier to have a conversation through Twitter than shouting over the amps.

The app works great for finding shows and seems to capture a pretty comprehensive set of listings. But the one thing it needs is better filters. For instance, it doesn’t let you see which shows near you have the most people going to them. Doshi says that is a feature they plan on adding in the future.

I like apps like SuperGlued because they try to do one thing well. You could just look at your normal Twitter stream for shows your friends are going to, but you’d probably only catch a few. SuperGlued shows you Tweets from everyone about a particular show or band. It’s an interest stream instead of a friend stream.

As realtime streams get more and more noisy, one way to cut down the noise is to use Twitter apps like SuperGlued that focus on a single topic or purpose. And it just so happens that SuperGlued is focused on finding you the right noise to enjoy, so to speak.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In an honest blog post, music recommendation and streaming service Blip.fm (which we likened to a Twitter for music when it launched almost exactly one year ago), CEO Jeff Yasuda has indicated that the startup is going through a rough phase right now that has forced it to make some fairly painful changes to their service.

The blog post, titled ‘Navigating the storm’, speaks volumes about Yasuda’s sentiments on the music industry in general, even if they are not all that outspoken. A short excerpt:

The challenges involved in running a start-up in the music space are immense. To be honest it’s completely nuts, but we are trying to navigate our way through the perfect storm: a struggling music industry, a global economic meltdown, and a fundamental shift in the way people relate to one another and share their appreciation for music.

The biggest change mentioned in the post is the following: the music Blip.fm will be streaming from now on will primarily be coming from Imeem, which means there will be some limitations to what can be streamed henceforth. This decision affects Blip.fm users not located in the U.S. in a big way, which basically means about 80% of its current user base is now using a trimmed down version of the service.

The other changes are:

* Adding urls to public mp3s will be limited to legitimate bands and labels approved in our systems
* The embeddable widget will still show blip messages, but won’t play the music in most cases.
* Where applicable, old blips will be replaced with content from the imeem catalog, but anything that doesn’t match will temporarily cease to function. We plan to add tools to allow you to correct any false matches and find replacements for unavailable tracks.
* We plan to add a preference to skip 30 second clips.
* Additional media content will be available as it is sourced via new partnerships.

Yasuda says he can’t go into detail about why the changes were made exactly, so we can only speculate about it at this point. The big elephant in the room here is that most of Blip.fm’ music catalog was being sourced from SeeqPod, and by now we know what kind of trouble that company is in (although they might still be saved by Microsoft). He does mention that the startup has engaged in talks with ‘lawyers, artists, people from the labels and aggregators’ besides software developers, publishing companies etc. to ensure the service stays alive and can keep adding features.

I’ve contacted the Blip.fm team for more information and will update this post if and when they get back to me.

Looking at their Compete stats (which usually underestimate actual traffic for websites), Blip.fm actually appears to have been growing nicely the past few months. Compete pegged monthly unique visitors going to the service at about half a million in April.

We should also note Fuzz, the initial company behind the Blip.fm service for which they raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding back in February 2008, recently sent its music destination site / social network Fuzz.com to the deadpool to focus completely on Blip.fm, making the whole situation extra painful for the 4-headed team.

Too soon to put Blip.fm on deadpool watch, but beyond a doubt its future is now less bright than it was before.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s pretty easy, in this day and age, to get frustrated with technology , and lose sight of how awesome our world is as a result of technological innovation. Every now and then some piece of news will come along to remind us of how great technology can be, leading us on an adventure of knowledge, and restoring our appreciation for science

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Not all gadgets suck: 50,000th pacemaker successfully installed

That was fast. Dynamism has the sweet looking Sharp Mebius NJ70A netbook up for preorder . You know the one.

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Sharp Mebius NJ70A netbook w/ LCD trackpad available for preorder