Lyric Of The Day - Update
I got a lot of feedback on my concept for the lyric of the day club on twitter that I posted yesterday. Here’s a reminder of the basic concept. If you have a twitter account, you simply post to twitter a short lyric that you think everyone will enjoy, along with song name and artist. Based on the feedback we got yesterday, here’s the way you do it:
1) send a twitter post that starts with @lotd Leave out the : at the end that I had suggested yesterday. then include a short lyric (we only have 140 characters to work with) and then end with a song name and artist. Here’s what I am going to post to twitter soon as my lyric of the day:
@lotd "I don’t want you to add me to your long list of estranged friends" Estranged Friends, The Eels
If you want and have room, it might be nice to add the album name (in this case, it’s Useless Trinkets).
2) that’s all you have to do. I am going to find someone to write a twitter bot over the next couple days. If you want to volunteer, @ message me on twitter, i am fredwilson. I see all @fredwilson messages because I track my account name.
3) once we get the twitter bot written, you’ll follow lotd and lotd will follow you back and you’ll see all the @lotd messages in your timeline.
That’s it for now. While we get the twitter bot written, please keep posting the lyrics using @lotd. Here’s what we’ve done to date. Something like 40 lyric posts from about 30 people playing along. Pretty great.
Here’s a couple of my favorites:
What’s so great about this one from Jason Yan is this song hasn’t even been released yet. The new Kooks record, Konk, is out on tax day. But I’ve got it so you can hear it right here. I just love the way the song starts out like a Billy Bragg folk song, and then about 35 seconds in, the guitars come in, first acoustic than electric and it turns into a kick ass rock song.
See The Sun – The Kooks – Kronk
Here’s another gem:
When I read this one from Jen, I thought "has to be talking heads". But no, it’s from the wonderful Mike Doughty, at the time fronting Soul Coughing and the link takes you to a live video of Soul Coughing (long defunct) doing True Dreams Of Wichita. Thanks Jen. I’ve never seen that done live.
The best thing of all. I’ve didn’t follow Jason or Jen. I do now.
Comments (Archived):
Twitterfeed.com would suffice until someone creates your bot.
Actually, don’t think Twitterfeed will work in this case. Because Twitter puts a login/pw on the replies RSS feed.Which is weird… why are replies secured?
Tell me exactly what you’d like me to set up and I’ll do it
Can we get details about this ‘bot’?That worked well.
@FeedUs It’s just a little script that checks the replies to @lotd every 15 minutes and then reposts anything new. It’s functional but not elegant (which makes me only half a code monkey for you Jonathan Coulton fans out there), so folks with good ideas should feel free to put together a better implentation.If you see anything obviously funky happening with it, you can just ping me on Twitter – @whitneymcn
I didn’t read all of the comments on the first thread, but this sounds like a fun idea. I actually like Jen’s style of posting, where the artist/song are hidden until you follow the link. Makes it a bit of a game.Sounds like the bot needs to follow it’s followers, and then repost any replies to it, is that right? Sounds easy enough… 🙂
daryn – d messaged you also, but here’s 140+ chars…It’s actually even easier than that — you don’t have to follow people to access their replies to you via the API, so it’s just grab replies, find new, repost.I like the “hidden title/artist” game, too. It’d be easy to just push title/artist outside the 140 limit so that it’s only available when you click through, but the problem is identifying where the quote ends and attribution begins: people aren’t consistent with use of quotes and attribution style, so it becomes a hairy guessing game. If you’ve got any clever ideas, though, that’d be very cool.Back to real work.
Just thinking about the possibilities here makes me all giddy inside – This is a beautiful concept and I can’t wait to see some flesh on it.
Hey fred, Very cool! I decided that trying to post relevant, pithy or observant things on Twitter was a losing battle and have for a year or so Twittered only a lyric snippet from whatever song is stuck in my head at any particular time. Without title or artist, which makes it a little more … I don’t know, weirdly opaque. On Twitter I’m trfall. See you out there.
Every good idea has someone who did it before you did. I am glad to see thatthis is no different. Thanks for the noteFred