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Topforty.it turns Twitter into a DJ

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:00:34 +0000

How’s this for crowdsourcing music discovery: Topforty.it turns all of our tweets about songs into a hit list of the music currently popular on Twitter, complete with the ability to play any of the listed tracks. The site currently lists today’s Top 40 as well as a list of all-time favorites, but Topforty.it founder Rezart Bajraktari told me he doesn’t want to stop with simple lists. Instead, he wants to soon launch full-fledged radio stations for various genres, with Twitter playing the role of the DJ.

Topforty’s current incarnation, which launched a week ago at the Velocity Demo day, is actually pretty neat already: It displays Twitter’s top tunes in a highly visual way, and utilizes YouTube embeds to make each and every entry playable. A video player on top of the page even makes it possible to listen to all 40 songs nonstop, or shuffle through them. The site also tells us how many people tweeted about any particular song and how its standing has changed when compared to the previous day.

The idea behind the site may sound a little like We Are Hunted, a service that has been tracking popular songs on P2P services and social networks for quite some time. Bajraktari, however, thinks there are some important differences. “Our ranking and discovery process tends to me much more transparent,” he told me via email. “With We Are Hunted it is hard to figure out how the popularity of the songs is being impacted and how it is changing overtime.”

Bajraktari said Topforty.it is already seeing very long engagement periods, with people keeping the site open for quite some time. He wants to further engage all these eyeballs with the upcoming launch of genre-specific radio stations that turn Twitter into a real-time DJ, with tweets being used to program each and every stream. He explains:

Different streams will exist based on genres at first, and as tweets come into Twitter mentioning songs in these streams they will be added to the queues the users are listening to. All of this will be in real-time as Twitter users tweet away, and of course fully transparent!

Topforty is a pretty neat mashup of Twitter and YouTube, and I’m looking forward to see how the Twitter-as-a-DJ incarnation will look like. But the site is also a good reminder of how much music is now available on YouTube. Granted, I stumbled across the odd cover version, but otherwise, YouTube seems perfectly capable of powering a crowd-sourced music service like this.

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Why YouTube Adopting Creative Commons Is a Big Deal

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:14:49 +0000

YouTube's new Creative Commons remix feature in its video editor.

Making legal YouTube mashups just got a whole lot easier. The site’s video editor is now allowing its users to remix existing YouTube videos without violating anyone’s copyright. This is made possible by YouTube adopting Creative Commons licenses, offering users the chance to publish any video under the liberal CC-BY license. It’s a big step forward for YouTube, and a giant leap for Creative Commons, which previously hasn’t played a big role in the web video world.

Here is how the new mashup feature, which is slated to go live at 9 a.m. PDT on Thursday, works: Creative Commons-licensed videos can be found from within YouTube’s video editor through a special CC tab. These videos can then be trimmed, combined with other clips and synchronized to music, just like users have been able to do with their own uploads ever since YouTube launched its video editor a year ago. “It’s as if all the Creative Commons videos were part of your personal library,” explained Product Manager Jason Toff when I talked to him on the phone yesterday.

YouTube's new Creative Commons licensing options.

YouTube’s catalog of Creative Commons clips is being seeded with more than 10,000 videos from partners like C-SPAN, Voice of America and Al-Jazeera. Users also now have the ability to publish any of their own videos under CC-BY simply by selecting the licenses as an option during the upload process.

Toff told me YouTube decided to go with CC-BY to keep the process as simple as possible. “The majority of users will be new to Creative Commons,” he said. CC-BY only requires that users credit the original videographer, and YouTube is automating this process by adding links to the original work next to every mashup video. Toff said that the site might add additional Creative Commons licenses in the future if there was strong demand for it.

Two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can't be reused commercially. Source: Creative Commons.

However, there’s another interesting aspect to the choice of license: Creative Commons has in the past been struggling with the fact that the majority of users tends to adopt more restrictive licenses. The organization estimated that two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can’t be reused commercially, and one out of four can’t be reincorporated into a new work at all.

CC-BY on the other hand allows commercial reuse as well. This doesn’t just open YouTube and its producers new revenue opportunities it also makes it possible to reuse these videos in a much wider variety of contexts. Wikipedia, for example, demands that any videos posted to its site can be reused commercially. Combine that with the fact that YouTube has been converting its entire catalog into the open source WebM format, and there’s little reason why tens of thousands of Creative Commons-licensed YouTube videos shouldn’t show up on Wikipedia any day now.

Creative Commons is also poised to benefit greatly from YouTube adopting its licenses. The organization has gotten a lot of traction amongst photographers ever since Flickr added a Creative Commons licensing options as part of its uploading process. Recent Flickr data reveals the site is now hosting close to 190 million Creative Commons-licensed photos. Its licenses haven’t been nearly as popular in the video space, where it has only been adopted by smaller hosting sites and select individual publishers. YouTube’s sheer magnitude could help to make Creative Commons mainstream for video as well.

Finally, adopting Creative Commons and making licensed videos instantly remixable is a big deal for YouTube too. The site has shown immense growth, with its users now uploading 48 hours of video very single minute. The next big challenge for YouTube is to grow the percentage of this material that’s monetizeable.

The site has been addressing this issue through equipment grants and other programs that aim to help producers to shoot better-looking videos. The new mashup functionality of YouTube’s video editor gives every user a chance to publish videos that look as good as the ones from the pros simply by building upon their works. And who knows, one of these Creative Commons-empowered remix artists may just produce the next Key of Awesome.

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Hunch Co-founder Releases Twitter-YouTube Mashup

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:08:09 +0000

Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon released a cool mashup called Forage Thursday night that utilizes the Hunch API to build personalized YouTube playlists based on the people you follow on Twitter. Just enter your Twitter username on Forage.com, select a music genre, and the site will generate a playlist with 20 YouTube music videos. You don’t need to have a Hunch account to try the service, but it’s nonetheless a very neat demonstration of the power of Hunch.

So how does it work? Dixon told me via email that Hunch uses preferences from existing users to predict recommendations for users not known to the system. “Basically we have about one million people who have Twitter (or) Facebook connected into Hunch and told us about their music preferences,” he said. “We use this ‘known’ data to make inferences about unknown users based on who they follow, who follows them, and other signals.”

Dixon also emphasized that Forage is exploratory by nature — it won’t necessarily list your favorite bands, but rather music you may want to try. And I gotta say, it actually works pretty well for that purpose. Not only does it serve up an interesting selection of videos, users can also link to the resulting playlists. Unfortunately, it struggles with one of the issues many music-focused YouTube mashups are facing: Some major labels aren’t allowing third party sites to embed their clips.

Don’t expect Dixon to invest a lot of time into resolving this issue. “Forage is really just a little hack I did,” he told me said, adding: “And I’m not a great programmer.” Still, it’s an interesting little demo of the power of Hunch and its take on taste-based predictions, which in turn could be really useful for many online video platforms and services.

Recent research from the BBC has shown that content recommendations have a significant impact on the time people spend watching video online, but companies like Netflix have in the past struggled to add social elements to these recommendations. Hunch’s approach of using known patterns to predict unknown preferences could help to make these types of recommendations much more valuable.

Chris Dixon stopped by our office a few months ago to talk about his experience as an angel investor and his thoughts on the VC model. Check out the first part of the interview embedded below, and read this post for the second part:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Tiltview Aims to Be CNN for Cord Cutters

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:00:52 +0000

Here’s a question we’re frequently getting ever since we launched our weekly Cord Cutters web series: If you cancel cable, how do you get your news? A new site called Tiltview is trying to provide an answer to that by mashing up news clips from a number of networks, giving viewers a leanback experience optimized for watching on devices like Google TV.

Tiltview users can skip over a news clip as well as hit the pause button on any video — but that’s about it, as far as interaction goes. The site automatically selects news sources and individual clips, making the experience very much like watching a 24/7 cable news program.

Tiltview’s developers told us that the site is using an algorithm to rank videos based on source, time published, view count and other factors to evaluate their newsworthiness. “Once you start watching the news, the list of what you are watching is updated in real-time,” they explained via email, adding: “High ranking news can be inserted into the list while you are watching. There is no need to refresh the page to see new contents.”

Similarities to CNN & Co. are no accident: Tiltview’s developers told us that they got the idea for the site after canceling cable and scouring news sites for videos. “Choosing which videos to play and clicking on each one made (us) realize there should be a better way to watch news online,” they said.

The mashup is based on clips found on YouTube, and some of the sources queried include YouTube accounts of news networks like Al-Jazeera, France 24, the New York Times and Russia Today. However, the site also seems to add clips from more partisan political outlets, such as Breitbart TV and Think Progress. Tiltview’s developers said they hope to add more videos from sites other than YouTube soon.

The advent of connected devices with integrated web browsers like Google TV and the Boxee Box has led to a number of Leanback-style mashups in mind in recent months. However, some of these sites have run into issues with rights holders. Listandplay.com, for example, recently shut down its MTV-like music video mashup because of potential music rights liabilities.

However, playing by the books can be tricky as well. The personalized news service 1Cast tried to offer a news feed similar to Tiltview with licensed content, but failed to get off the ground and recently shut down.

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Find a Mailbox, Post Office, or UPS Location With MailboxMap

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:00:52 +0000

I do a lot of my correspondence electronically, but sometimes I still need to mail a letter. I know where the blue US Postal Service mailboxes are in my neighborhood, but it’s getting harder to find pickup locations when I’m on the road, since USPS has removed over half of its boxes in the past 20 years.

So I’m pleased that I’ve discovered MailboxMap. It’s a simple web site built around a Google Maps mashup. Just enter an address or zip code, and it will display a map showing the locations of mailboxes in the neighborhood. Click on a mailbox icon, and it will display pickup times.

MailboxMap also shows post offices and UPS locations, complete with hours. And there’s a mobile version, which has the advantage of displaying search results in a list, making it easier to skim for late pickups. It would be nice, though, if one could search for, say, pickups after 3:00 pm, or for Saturday pickups.

It’s not a perfect service; for example, it locates Seattle’s downtown post office on the wrong side of the street. Google Maps itself locates the same address correctly, so it’s unclear what the problem is. Nevertheless, MailboxMap is a useful service.

The site has been around for a couple of years, but it seems to be up to date, as it shows a recent pickup time change for my local box. It’s probably too much to hope that USPS will buy this site and add it to usps.com.

How often do you mail letters?

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Monty Python’s Sales Spike, Star Trek 90210: NTV Station Today

Liz Shannon Miller — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:05:30 +0000

It’s nice to see the medium of online video used to its greatest potential. Today’s pinnacle: a mash-up of the new trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek and the Beverly Hills 90210 theme song. Magnificent.

And sometimes making your content available to the masses pays off. Big time. Today Steve Bryant breaks down how Monty Python’s new YouTube channel has spiked their Amazon sales, to the point where “the nearest sales competitors include two DVD packages of perennially popular TV series 24, the new release of Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work, and one of the most popular films of the year, The Dark Knight.” Not bad for a group of blokes who haven’t done anything new since 1983. Check out the full analysis at NewTeeVee Station!

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Karina’s Capsule: Common/People

Karina Longworth — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:30:15 +0000

Yeah, alright…that William Shatner “Common/People” Star Trek mashup spoof thing has a few things in it to make it worth recommending. It is, for the most part, edited with enough proficiency that the voice of William Shatner speak/singing the 1995 Pulp anthem occasionally seems to be coming organically from the animated Captain Kirk’s mouth. Formally and in terms of choreography, there’s a sort of inverse symmetry between this and the original Pulp video: Where Jarvis Cocker’s arms and hips flail in complex patterns as if divorced from his generally blasé face, the animated Kirk and Spock’s limbs remain stiff and controlled, while their eyes and eyebrows provide implicit color commentary. Also, recast here as the backup singer on Spock and Kirk’s mating song, Uhura is totally fierce.

But it’s not as good as could/probably should be. Maybe it’s so inevitable that any kind of Star Trek fan fic will involve Kirk and Spock pledging love that we don’t actually need to see it play out, we can fill in the gaps between an opening hint and a closing one. But that doesn’t justify the fact that when this vid gives up the courtship plot halfway through –– and despite an explosion of spectacle –– it just gets kind of boring until the tacked-on pledge of manly respect coded as expression of repressed romance.

And really: How many videos based on this simple equation do we need to see? We get it: 1+1 = gay, and gay = comedy gold. Aren’t we supposed to be demanding more, or is it naive to hold on to hope that media made outside of mainstream corporate mandates could possible transcend easy formula? Why are we so content to allow the agenda for the supposed counterculture of web video to be determined by the comic crutches of people like Andy Samberg?

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