Unfortunately, my powerbook died yesterday while I was looking for a place to move. I will probably send it in for repairs, but that will have to wait until after my move. Until then, I apologize if i’m very late getting back to anyone emailing or otherwise. See you from Sunnyvale!
A few weeks ago, I spied a link to an inconspicuous flash-based internet radio application called Pandora. The reviewer (who I can’t recall – several have written about it by now) gushed about the service, but I didn’t understand what was so different. After all, i’d seen many, many different spins on internet radio – old school shoutcast, consolidated major internet radio stations and their legal battles against The Man, KCRW’s music and live streams (Hell, I was even a subscriber until they dumped Joe Frank), home DJs hosting their live playlist in IRC, and even Rhapsody‘s artist radio service that I had for a while.
Pandora blows everything else out of the water when it comes to serendipity.
You type in an artist name, or the name of a song that you fancy. It thinks for about 15 seconds, extracts the key musical elements of that particular taste, and boom, gives you internet radio from your browser. No applications to download. I started using IE for it exclusively to avoid closing my radio when closing all Firefox windows.
While it’s playing, you can ask it why it’s playing a particular song, say you like a song, say you don’t like it (which automatically skips it as well – nice), and jump to iTunes or Amazon search. It saves your list of liked radio stations.
It’s free for the first 10 hours, which I used, then subscribed to when it ran out, because I had already found two international music artists that I absolutely loved. I rarely subscribe to an online service, and I hate most online recommendation systems, but this is one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in the pure, simple, and joyous discovery of music that you might like.
For example, Pandora found me Bic Runga when I was listening to my “Jason Mraz Radio”. She’s a New Zealand-based artist that i’d absolutely have never heard of in the US. Her beautiful songs have been on heavy repeat here at my apartment, with earnest, heartfelt lyrics and wistful melodies. I’m listening to her song, “When I See You Smile” right now, and here’s what Pandora says when I ask why it’s playing this song:
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features mellow rock instrumentation, folk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, melodic songwriting and major key tonality.
My jaw drops open at that kind of expertly collected metadata.
As I listen to Pandora, I tend to leave it on as background music. However, a couple times a day I tend to hear a song that just resonates with me, and Pandora has trained me to quickly jump over to it, check out the artist, and if I really love it, add it to my Amazon wishlist for storing. Guys, this is the future of targeted marketing to the individual, and you need to experience it even if you don’t listen to music.
For more technical details from a smart VC, please check out David Hornik’s excellent post about Pandora, describing the intense process of manual, human data collection from thousands of songs.
If you’ve grabbed v0.230, please get this v0.231 update of Freetag. It has a fix for a problem with the $table_prefix option which was preventing some methods from working. I just found it now while working on multiple tag databases for Upcoming.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
I’m always very proud of my parents! My Mom, of course, for raising the four of us independent, crazy kids (harder than it looks). And my Dad, who I take a lot of my work ethic and inspiration from.
My Dad is a prominent Gastroenterologist (digestive systems doctor) specializing in Colon Cancer during his research years, and I offhandedly was discussing eating fish and worrying about mercury content. My Dad comes back with a handy notecard with the following information:
OK
Once a month
NO
Well, I’ll probably still eat anything that a good sushi chef prepares for omakase. And, as Anthony Bourdain recommends, don’t eat fish on Mondays. But this list is very handy for me, and wow, i’ve started really looking at “Farm-raised” and “color added” labels on fish nowadays. This isn’t an “official” list of anything, just some crib notes from my dad about a topic that piqued my curiousity. If you have any questions about whether fish is right in your own diet, please consult your own doctor! (Just trying to CMA, you know…)
I think people are starting to understand and use NingPets! This makes me very excited. 
As you can see, we’ve now got two new additions – Ferretster and CockerSpanielster. This is exactly the kind of thing that I was referring to within my comment on SiliconBeat about the Ning announcement. It’s an entirely new model of community participation! In analogy mode, Ning is to traditional content websites what Folksonomy is to Taxonomy. Instead of relying upon the limited resources of a single organization to make a variety of either 1) Community small sites about pets or 2) Rigidly defined Pet Types within a single pet app, you instead let the community branch out and define things on their own.
It’s fun to see this concept catch on.
Today marks the day that Yahoo! has officially acquired Upcoming.org. Here’s the official announcement, which covers the basics:
The acquisition of Upcoming.org builds upon Yahoo! Local’s mission to create the most precise, relevant and comprehensive local search experience available online. Events are a critical component of local content applications and through this acquisition, Yahoo! Local will look to further enhance its exiting events platform with community driven information.
As the first of its kind, Upcoming.org has established itself a leading event site that harnesses the power of user generated content and social media to capture localized event information and dramatically improve the relevance of local search results.
Tackling the tricky problems behind events is a worthy challenge. Many sites make an attempt to be a calendar on the Internet, but what both Upcoming and Y! have recognized is that it takes more than being a comprehensive data source to get relevant, interesting event information to yourself and your friends. Andy Baio, Leonard Lin, and myself have been making progress lately in doing interesting, cool stuff with events, and we’re happy to become valued members of the Y! Local team, trusted to turn our part-time ideas and blue sky into a tangible, fully-featured events offering.
The opportunity to join forces with Y! ultimately bespeaks all of our sincere interest in making a useful, interesting events substrate on which a flourishing, social community can naturally grow.
Alas, from a personal point of view, I’m simply exhausted! So I apologize in advance if this post got a little too full of jargon. Hey, it’s not every day when your two top secret announcements (Ning & Upcoming.org) in the works come to light within the same 24 hour period. ïŠ For more details, check out http://upcoming.org tomorrow for the full story.
UPDATE: For now, if you’re craving more info, you can look into the Y! Search Blog, or look at Andy and Leonard’s announcements via the links above.
UPDATE: Here’s the official news post with a short Q&A on Upcoming.org.
For the past four months, I’ve been hard at work on several projects that, until now, I haven’t been able to discuss. What I’m happy to announce now is that 24HL’s playground for app development, Ning, is out there in public beta! You can see my work in Bubrub, a Yubnub clone for Ning (my first Ning project), and also the NingPets network of apps.
Describing the way that NingPets works is a good way to introduce the capabilities of the playground, as well as how I believe that app developers will likely collaborate and build interesting structures of apps that can communicate with one another via the shared content store.
The way it works is that there are user-cloneable “pet†applications which can easily be created for any type of pet imaginable. I started with the app called Bulldogster. To start with, you can add bulldog profiles with icon JPEGs, modify bulldog metadata, add friends/family, and see what other Bulldogs have similar attributes. I provide about 5-6 custom attributes (like “Favorite Dog Park†or “Favorite Foodâ€) aside from name, short bio, birthday, gender, and icon, which help each pet owner customize their profile online.
Here’s where it gets interesting: if you don’t care about Bulldogs, but you love African Greys, you just sign up as a beta developer, clone the Bulldogster application, then use the web-based setup form to change the configuration of the app to be all about African Greys. The header and the app is automatically completely customized, and you can also edit the custom attributes you care about for African Greys. You’ll be able to keep a little “Africangreyster†Blog on the frontpage, and not only that, but you can extend your app with plugins hosted on Ning.
The way that the plugin architecture that I wrote works is a subject worthy of its own blog post, but here’s a general overview. Each app for a particular pet can install plugins hosted on Ning itself, and can pick whatever version of the plugin that it wants. Instead of having to copy files and/or upload plugins to the server, you just use a web-based Plugin Control panel that automatically communicates with my plugin hosting app to show and let you install plugins directly! My first plugin that I made available is called “NingPet War!†which is a direct conversion of the “ThisOrThat†app into a pet plugin. You can easily run a cuteness contest on your app, or have an intelligence showdown between African Greys.
The super interesting thing about all of this is that because all NingPets apps are cloned and configured through Ning content objects, you can have a parent application like NingPets that knows about every active NingPet app’s content on the system. Thus, you can browse around all the pet profiles uploaded, and make friends between pets sitting on different apps. More interesting functionality can then be built into the parent app, which gets the advantage of having access to all the apps on the playground.
As you can see, there are some unique, cool advantages to developing on the Ning playground.
I’m really happy to finally be able to talk about this in public, as it’s been a pretty cool ride the past few months. Everyone working on Ning has been extremely thoughtful and very interested in feedback that we developers have been giving during the private beta. It’s been amazing to see how far the playground has come in the past 4 months, and I can’t wait to see what becomes of the apps we’ve been working on. Best of luck, guys!
I usually forget to make a projects page on my blog, so I finally got around to making it. You can get to it from the top links now. Hopefully I will be announcing two new projects that have been under active development within the next month, so keep tabs on this blog and that project page for updates.