I’ve always been one to choose my own adventure. In the past, this has led me to found and work at a string of small scrappy startups, of which I am immensely proud. But new challenges are also important - they help us to grow and hone our craft.

A couple of months ago, I went down to Chirp - Twitter’s developer conference - to promote a Twitter app I developed called BirdHerd. While BirdHerd received some great press during the conference, what really happened was I was struck by two things:

• The quality and passion of the team at Twitter
• The scale of the problems the team are tackling

Basically, I realized that I wanted to play too. All of those users. All of that data. The scale - It was all just too irresistible. I was sold.

I believe that Twitter is a truly transformative product - so much so that I think we have trouble even imagining where it will take us in the years to come. Will Twitter be able to tell us who our next President will be, before voting even starts? Could Twitter help spread revolutions in far away countries? Perhaps Twitter will fundamentally change how businesses interact with their customers… Who knows! But I *do* know I want to be there front and center to find out.

Twitter is a product that I use every day, and I’m incredibly stoked to be working on making it better.

So in the immortal words of James Brown:

As expected, we were able to confirm that Drummers, always the butt of jokes, were indeed often last on the list, while ego loving, spotlight hogging guitar players typically received top billing.

Check out the graphic for full breakdowns.

Stay tuned for more!

The data we have been given access to is very comprehensive! For example, we have data on over 40 million website track plays, going back to 2001 when “indie” still meant something, Last.fm and Gmail didn’t exist yet, and I was still touring with my own band.

One of the first things we did with this data was to geocode all 40 million of the listens, and plot it on a map using Processing. Check it out below:

R3Labs: The R3 40 Million! from blprnt on Vimeo.

I’m going to be doing some regular posts here with updates from this project, so stay tuned!

I built BirdHerd because I needed a way for the many startups I work with to use Twitter effectively.

In the past, we always just shared a common password amongst team members, but this became troublesome when a team member would leave and we’d have to change the password, and then we’d have to tell everyone what the new password is. Or someone would forget the password, reset it it to something new, and effectively lock everyone out. Needless to say, this was not ideal, and had the undesired effect of causing people to not update the group Twitter account as often as they could.

Next, I started looking at a few existing Twitter tools, but I definitely wanted something that would work from any client or device. Our team members use TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMS and the Twitter web site, and I knew that if they had to log into a different web app to update the group account (like other group Twitter tool CoTweet forces you to do), the updates wouldn’t flow as fast as they could/should. I also wanted to use oAuth to manage passwords safely. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to both communicate publicly by posting messages from the Twitter account, but I also wanted to be able to send a private group message to all my team members (through a DM).

I couldn’t find such a tool, and so, with a firm belief that there had to be a better way, BirdHerd was born – and you can try it right now. It’s even getting some good initial press! I hope it makes using Twitter with your group or team easy.

- Tried the online demo, and loved the user experience and admin dashboard. Very polished UI for an Open Source project. (+1 for Magento)
- Huge download (-1 for Magento)
- Convoluted download process and scant details for the SVN checkout (-1 for Magento)
- The Zend framework. Magento is built on the Zend Framework, and in my opinion, the Zend Framework is like a hole in the head. Everyone has their favorite flavour of ice cream, so this is really just my personal preference, but coming from something like Rails to the Zend Framework is like running full speed into a brick wall. Does one really need an XML configuration file to point to the location of other XML configuration files? Yeeessh (-2 for Magento)
- Decent web admin tools to add products and create a catalog. Clients could (mostly) grok it. (+1 for Magento)
- Pretty straight forward to theme, although it could be easier. (+1 for Magento)

Totally subjective and largely meaningless score: -1 (Magento’s weaknesses slightly outweigh positives, in my opinion)

So in summary, Magento is a large, (overly?) complex code base with a great admin and frontend user interface. It’s fairly easy to skin, but I found developing custom functionality a drag. Keep in mind, this was the first Magento site I’ve built, and there’s always a learning curve for every project.

My biggest complaint though is something that I have trouble even articulating. It’s a “vibe”, if you will. Having worked on the Drupal project for a number of years, I have seen first hand how an open source project can (and should) be run. The Magento team could learn a lot from looking at the development processes that projects like Drupal and WordPress employ. For example, with Magento extensions, in most cases, it seemed to not be possible to download actual source code, but rather, you had to enter a key and then Magento would download the package for you. In almost all cases, it feels like the actual source code is kept away from end users. Where is the place to file, and track bugs against various extensions? Where can I browse the source code online? How can I contribute bug fixes? To me, an open source project should be more then trial ware, with an option to upgrade to a premium edition. Open source software is largely about community development, and I don’t see an active developer community hacking away on Magento.

Other alternatives: (open source) Ubercart, Spree (Monthly fee) Shopify, FoxyCart

Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!

Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)

Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.

Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.

As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.

The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.

There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:

“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”

I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.

Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.

I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.

Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.

I have the pleasure to moderate a “tech talk” panel at 1:00pm on building music related web apps with:

• Tom Conrad - Pandora
• Marc Urbaitel - In Ticketing
• Ethan Kaplan - Warner Bros.
• Jack Moffitt - Chesspark / Xiph
• Jeremy Riney - Playlist.com

Lessons learned from last SF Music Summit: Easy on the soju cocktails…

Should be a blast, and I hope to see you all there.