VirtualPresence: FriendFeed - Basics

At first, I was planning on gently describing some of the building blocks of the social web, like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and so on. This would then lead into some of the more tricky stuff like FriendFeed. However, as my posting is somewhat irregular, I have decided to immediately go to some of the more fun stuff. If you think I'm going too fast, let me know and I will fill in some of those intermediate steps (and who knows, I might get to them later on anyway...).

So, on to FriendFeed!

FriendFeed is social aggregation web app, which is just a fancy way of saying that they collect what you share on other websites and present this as a single stream of information. You just make an account, add the sites that you use regularly and FriendFeed will capture what you do on those. Posted a Twitter message, favorited a YouTube movie, loved a song on last.fm, these are just some examples of what FriendFeed pulls in. Overall, they now support 48 services. You can also directly share links through FriendFeed.

Next to adding sites you use, you can also "follow" other FriendFeed users. Similar to following someone in Twitter, you will see whatever they shared (on sites they registered) appear in your FriendFeed account. As you can imagine, following a lot of people could become tricky through all different stuff that enters your account. To make this somewhat more manageable, you are able to add people you follow to different lists. I made separate lists to follow tech people, for instance.

You can find me on FriendFeed as well, of course. I share all kinds of stuff over there, not just metal-related items.

What about my band?

FriendFeed can be a good way to augment your online presence for fans that really want to follow what you are about. It makes it easy for people to follow what you do without them having to create accounts on all the same sites. Suppose that you posted a bunch of pictures of your last gigs on Flickr, FriendFeed will pick them up and fans that never go to Flickr will still be able to see them. 

Following other people is also somewhat easier through the different lists you can put them in. You can make a "Fans" list (where you could follow what your fans are sharing), a "Bands" list (where you can follow other bands with FriendFeed accounts), and so on.

Here, I have scratched the surface of FriendFeed because it will get even more interesting once we get to the supporting features and FriendFeed rooms.

Do you have a question about using webapps for your band? Drop me an email, and I might answer it on the blog.

Graspop 2009 dates announced

Mark your calendars!

The dates for the Graspop 2009 festival have been announced: 26-27-28 june 2009.

Now the speculating for who might play can begin. My wishlist:

1. The Black Dahlia Murder
   
2. Amon Amarth
   
3. Slipknot
   
4. Crimson Falls
5. Neurosis
6. Deathstars
7. All Shall Perish
   
8. Anaal Nathrakh
9. Saattue
10. Aborted
11. Cradle Of Filth

Who would you like to see on Graspop in 2009?

VirtualPresence: Do you have that URL in Small?

If you used a service like Twitter for any amount of time, you quickly run into the problem of sharing a link through it. 140 character is not a lot of space, but there is a solution for this through URL shorteners. There is a whole lot of them, but the basics are the same for all. You give them a URL that you want to share, and they return you with a very short replacement URL that you can then use in Twitter (or anywhere else for that matter). When someone clicks the replacement URL, they are sent to the original one.

From a technical standpoint, a URL shortener is not that hard to create which is probably the reason why there are so many. Let's have a look at a few:

1. TinyURL: This is about the first one I remember seeing online. Basic stuff, convert a long url into a short one. As a bonus, they'll let you choose an extension if you want to (good luck finding something readable that's not yet used).
2. icanhaz: A URL shortener based on the lolcats. They also let you suggest an extension yourself.
3. bit.ly: A newer URL shortener that took the idea further. If you shorten a URL with bit.ly, you can later on go and see how often it was clicked. They also download the page you referred to and archive it, so you can still see it if it would go down.

What about my band?

I recommend going with a URL shortener that can show you clickthroughs, like bit.ly. New services that build on Twitter start up regularly, if someone clicks your shortened URL through any of those, it will show up on the bit.ly info page as well. If you're not interested in clickthroughs, I'd still use it. Bit.ly is one of the shortest domains, and you never know when you change your mind and want to see them anyway.

Do you have a question about using webapps for your band? Drop me an email, and I might answer it on the blog.

Murder Manifest is following you

Two days ago, I noticed a new follower on my Twitter account. It was none other than Dutch death thrash formation, Murder Manifest. It looks like they got their online presence well established through their own website, and Twitter, Last.fm, and YouTube accounts (among a few others). They appear to be a good example of what I try to describe with the VirtualPresence posts.

But there is more - and this is the real kicker - they released their entire album, called Mental Surgery, for free online. You can go to their site and download it. Which I immediately did, of course. Especially as they mention being influenced by bands as Aborted, The Black Dahlia Murder and Dissection. They also released the album on cd on the 1st of September. I expect this type of distribution to grow further in the coming years, as even more mainstream artists are starting to do this. The best other example that I know about is Trent Reznor of NIN who seems to be at the forefront of developing new ways to interact with his fans and the public.

Now I'm going to put this Murder Manifest album on and listen to what they managed to produce.

An automatic lyrics evocifier.

I got an interesting comment to my previous post on the lyrical analysis (of Nocturnal by The Black Dahlia Murder). The idea that was proposed went as follows:

• Would it be possible to build a tool that could take a (first draft) of the lyrics to a song and propose more evocative words, or maybe introduce certain figures of speech?
• Would someone want to use it?

My short answer would be: 

Build such a tool? probably yes. 

Would someone want to use it? it depends.

Let's dig a little deeper and see what such a tool could look like and what kind of features it might have:

1. A thesaurus: I would probably start with this. Easiest way of getting synonyms. I can envision a tool where you paste in your text, it gets analysed and you get a smart ui for displaying the results. Maybe the original text with possible word replacements in a different colour and when you hover over them, you get a pop-up with possible replacement words.
2. Smart replacement algorithms: You can't just blindly replace words in a song as the timing of the song needs to be respected. Therefore, you need more or less the same number of syllables when you replace something or you have to replace multiple words. You might need to take phonetics into account as well to make sure replacement words sound "correct" next to the other words.
3. Figures of speech: Now we get into more tricky territory. Working figures of speech into lyrics will be hard. Some of the more technical ones (like an alliteration) seem doable, even though you will be working on multiple words at once. But it doesn't take long before you need your tool to be able to understand the meaning of words, which brings us to...
4. Semantics: The joy and trouble with English words is that you usually have several synonyms for a word that mean more or less the same, but convey slightly different nuances of that concept. Unfortunately songs can be about anything, which means your tool needs to know about the general meaning of words as well. There isn't one specific domain that you could try to model. You basically have to do them all.
5. Automatic translation: There exist a lot of bands whose members do not natively speak English. If they could write in their mother tongue and have tool translate it correctly to English and introduce more descriptive words and figures of speech while all the time maintaining the underlining meaning and atmosphere... Killer feature, I'd say.

Looking over the list, I think it would be possible to build a tool that does 1, 2, and at least part of 3. Entries 4 and 5? years away.

Part of the problem is indeed also who would be using the tool. At least for metal bands, not all of them go the atmospheric way. If you're in a down-to-earth band with songs about real life and society, then you are going to want to use words like "bloody" instead of "sanguinary". And even if you would want to use such a tool, a lot of bands probably would not want to pay for it. You can find a thesaurus online for free, ask friend who knows English well to help out, and save the money for other stuff like instruments...

Nevertheless, I found it a cool thought expirement. Now it's up to you! Did I miss a cool other possible feature? Am I underestimating what is possible linguistically? Or if you're in a band and write lyrics, would you pay for a tool like this?