The second release in my thing-a-week discipline is Tweet and Shout. Tweet and Shout monitors twitter for buzz about bands, ranks them, and lets you see what people are saying about an artist. For example, you can see that Coldplay is one of twitter’s most talked-about bands, or note that most of what people are saying about Britney Spears is gossip. You can see which twitter users have recently commented about an artist, and which artists a user has mentioned. Each artist’s page also shows how they’ve done over the past few days (on twitter as well as amazon mp3).

I’ll be the first to admit that this app isn’t groundbreaking or thought-provoking. The fact that it’s interesting at all is due entirely to a few simple things:

1. Recency. Twitter posts are only interesting for a few minutes; then they get old and obsolete. Grouping posts by subject helps you get a sense of recent sentiment on that subject.
2. Relevance. Most random twitter messages are irrelevant. Normally, you filter out irrelevant twitter content by only reading tweets from your friends. But with a list of band names and summize, you can find content relevant to music in general.
3. Pictures of people. I love stating the obvious: it’s fun to see a lot of faces and suvery, or imagine, the range of attitudes they express. In tweetandshout, this goes for both twitter users and musicians. Without pictures, I’d be hard pressed to generate some amazing statistical reports to make the site informative. With pictures, the tone changes completely; it’s enough to just browse and people-watch.
4. Bands we know. The world of music is dominated by a few hundred extremely well-known artists. It might be more interesting to see what people are saying about local, not-yet-famous artists, but it’s a lot easier to just look at and talk about a single popularity contest.

The app is built on Summize, an excellent search engine for twitter. Tweetandshout stays relatively current by pulling a few hundred Atom feeds from Summize every hour or two. The list of artists comes from AmazonMP3’s top 400 rankings, which are updated daily.

It might be interesting to see an app like this targeted at a topic area other than music. A generalized summize+ranking+trends app could help you capture the buzz about, say, your local restaurants, the town where you live, a set of geeky events, or just a few friends of yours. Maybe Summize will incorporate that as a feature of their product. (Note to summize: I might be available for some consulting work. )

Reflecting on the Week

Tweet and shout wasn’t my original project for the week. I had started out trying to build a little MP3 streaming program for my BlackBerry. See, my BlackBerry Curve has wifi and, according to the API documentation, the ability to stream music over the network. Maybe if I hacked things right, I’d be able to use my BlackBerry as a sort of wireless headphone system at home, streaming music stored on my PC.

I released oraclebot last Tuesday (the 13th) and then started studying the Blackberry environment. By Thursday, it was clear I couldn’t complete any significant mobile app in under a week. I’d worked through some tutorials, read a book and a half in PDFs downloaded from RIM’s developer center, installed the SDK, and gotten a customized “Hello World” program onto my BlackBerry. But I didn’t know the basic UI APIs, and many of the BlackBerry’s APIs (e.g. the ones that talk over the network or launch the browser) require the developer to sign their code with a cryptographic key that costs $100. Plus BarCamp Boston was coming up, and as an organizer, I’d be 120% occupied during the event on Saturday and Sunday.

So I switched gears to a simple app I thought I could release. I worked on it for most of Thursday and Friday and spent the weekend at BarCamp. Exhausted after the event, I took Monday off — had a long lunch with some friends and watched a movie. I mostly wrapped up the coding on Tuesday, and meant to ship and announce this morning. But between hitting a bug in _elementtidy.fixup on my server, adding a last-minute tweak to attempt reasonable searches for bands with names like “The Who” or “Yes”, and writing this post, it looks like I’ve soaked up most of today as well. Oh well, at least it’s done. Better late than… even later.

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Pete finally realizes that blogs can form a basis for personalized web search. In other news from Pete, Gmail is adding an aggregator, Feedmesh still seems like a good idea that is only alive thanks to Bob Wyman, and AllConsuming is tagging for books.

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This new search engine uses the pages bookmarked by users of spurl.net. It's pretty nifty.

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John Battelle follows up on the Bloglines acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The companies made their official announcements today.

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Bloglines has a pretty mild level of lock-in, it's true. Thanks to export OPML, it's fairly easy to take your data to another aggregator. Even this hassle, however, is not negligible. If Bloglines has cornered the market for people seeking a simple, easy-to-access, no-installation-required aggregator, many of their customers might indeed not care to figure out what OPML means. Additionally, they have the usual lock-in that results from users being accustomed to a certain interface.

Also, as Mary points out, the historical archive of blog posts that Bloglines has is pretty valuable. I would say especially so for a search engine.

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Mary Hodder has the scoop. This is an interesting story for two reasons: it could have strong effects on the blog dot-coms, and it's a great example of a company that was built to be sold.

Effects on the blog dot-coms: Bloglines has a large user base, rivalled in size and service lock-in only by LiveJournal. Although the interface emphasizes the aggregator, Bloglines is also designed to support a fast and excellent blog search engine. Coupled with the extensive data Bloglines has about who reads what, Ask Jeeves has just acquired a wealth of information that can help them produce better search results.

Built to be sold: Mark Fletcher, who previously built and sold ONEList (now Yahoo! groups), knows something about acquisitions. He built Bloglines to be scalable from the start; I've never heard of it being slow or inaccessible. I'd guess it's not going to be hard to tweak its interfaces to the new brand. I am curious about the Bloglines (or parent company, Trustic) employees—are they mostly contractors, with no promise of long-term employment? Have they been compensated with equity in anticipation of a liquidity event? Did they just move to Ask Jeeves? Or did they just get laid off while Fletcher pocketed $N million dollars?

Oh yeah, it would be interesting to know how much Mr. Jeeves paid. I'm pretty sure Bloglines wasn't in any hurry to get sold, and I think it's worth a lot to a search engine company. Yahoo bought ONEList for $432M in stock, but that was in 2000; that stock would now be worth about $277M. Adjusting for hype and a hazy notion of comparative value, I'd guess Bloglines garnered $30-50M. But I'm hoping we'll get more information.

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I'm the top Shimon in MSN search. I look forward to seeing Google's response to this exciting competitive threat.

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Peter Caputa linked to this post by Brian Dear suggesting Taggle, a search engine for tags across various folksonomy systems such as del.icio.us and flickr. Philipp Lenssen gave it a shot at Find Forward.

Stringing together this series of ideas and consequences is one of the most rewarding parts of blogging.

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A great article on the upcoming Google/Microsoft architecture war, by Charles Ferguson of High Stakes, No Prisoners fame.

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