Lyric Of The Day - Ready For Prime Time
The lyric of the day group on twitter is now ready for prime time thanks to the quick work of Whitney McNamara on tuesday night. Whitney wrote the twitter bot that makes all of this work.
So, here are the rules of the game:
1) join twitter if you aren’t already a member. you can do that by going to twitter and signing up or you can simply send a text message on your phone to 40404 that says follow lotd and then follow the instructions that will be text messaged to you
2) if you are already a member of twitter, just go to the lotd page and hit the follow button. You can also send an update on your phone to 40404 (save that number as twitter on your phone) that says follow lotd. if you do that, you’ll get the updates delivered on your phone too which some like and some don’t. I do.
3) whenever you hear a lyric you like (it has to be short, less than 140 characters), simply post an update to twitter that looks like this:
@lotd "lyric" song name, artist name
here’s an example from my lotd post yesterday
@lotd "I don’t want you to add me to your long list of estranged friends" Estranged Friends, The Eels
That’s all there is to it. We will all be sharing lyrics with each other.
There are some variants on the @lotd post that are already cropping up that I like.
Some people don’t put song and artist name in their post. They want people to guess. That’s fine with me, but I think they should put the word guess at the end of the post if they want people to guess.
Bijan has started to post the song to tumblr and post the tumblr link at the end of the post instead of song name and artist name. That’s a nice trick and I copied him today with this post:
@lotd "i need all the friends i can get" the social networking industry theme song. http://fredwilson.vc/post/30672175
That works pretty well because if you want to guess, you can, and if you want the answer you can click thru and find it (and listen too).
I expect we’ll get a bunch of variants on the basic idea and I am looking forward to that. Right now we have 63 followers and 72 total updates since Whitney turned on the bot. I think we might have something like 150 lyrics posted to twitter in the past three days since we started this whole thing. I am having fun with this and I think a bunch of others are too.
Finally, here’s a portion of a note Whitney wrote me last night with some details on how he did this:
– How It Works —
The main thing to note is that this is (a) possible, and (b) pretty damn
easy only because Twitter allows you to do pretty much everything via
its API. Dave Winer’s "Twitter is a coral reef" idea totally applies
here: having the API means that the hardest part of making something
like the @lotd bot is just having the idea — once you’ve got the idea,
Twitter makes it easy to build what you’ve got in your head. The bot
basically takes three steps:
1. Every 15 minutes, call the Twitter API to get recent @replies that
have been sent to lotd.
2. Check whether any of those replies are new, and if so load them into
a database, noting that we haven’t reposted them yet.
3. Pull any unposted replies from the DB, reformat them a little, and
then call the Twitter API to repost them one by one.
Comments (Archived):
I love seeing an “idea” drive technology. It’s really the way it’s supposed to work. Otherwise it’s just tech for tech’s sake.As my submission today suggests: “Its the beginning of a new age” New Age, Velvet Underground
I like the idea of a lyric of the day, but I’m not down with the twittering and tumblring and whatnot. Why do you guys neeed to complicate everything – oh yeah you want to justify all the gadjets and widgets and nonsense you make money developing.Have fun.”I know that it’s evilI know that it’s got to beI know I ain’t doing muchDoing nothing means a lot to me” – Down Payment Blues, AC/DC, Powerage
when you get this on your new phone jackson, let me know what you thinkfred
It would be very cool if each lyric linked Amazon so I could both preview and purchase the song.Muxtape will be doing something like that, from what I hear.
I like lotd a lotbesides being fun & easy , for me, lyrics are a big part of why I like some songs so much.
What a marvelously clever way of bumping twitter subscriptions (portfolio company?)I’ve been sitting on the fence re: twitter — I didn’t want to waste my attention on the “tweets” of twits. But this I like… GordonJ is now the twit known as inbqx (if “twit” is indeed the right term 😉
yes, there are many motives. But first and foremost, I love music and I love talking about and sharing music with othersFred
great im in !
this is way cool.
I love the idea. I thought it might be cool to see how it spreads, so I put together some stats (updated hourly)http://sa-da-te.blogspot.co…
OK, this isn’t a LOTD, and I’m not trying to start another trend, but I wanted to share this great MQOTD (Musician’s Quote Of The Day) that I just saw (on DVR) Adam Duritz of Counting Crows say on Private Seesions:”I don’t get stage fright… Just rest of the day fright!”:-)
Hi Fred2 quick comments: – lotd is going to be used as a vehicle for twitter spam. When it has sufficient followers, it will prove irresistible to some to blast out a message to large numbers of people. Then the lotd bot will need to have spam detection, which will be hard (apart from easy things like filtering out URLs), and people will unfollow. – I think it would be slightly better if you sent to lotd by DM. Then the people who follow the submitter wouldn’t see everything twice.Terry
Hey, Terry -You’re right on #1, but at this point I’m just enjoying that there’s enough community spirit to keep it from happening for the time being. There are quite a few things you can do to minimize spam if/when it comes up, but I think that some amount is inevitable. You could drastically reduce by requiring that accounts be approved before they can post and placing a hard limit of 1 post/account/day, but that really changes that character of what’s happening so I’d rather not go there unless it’s necessary.I think you’re right about d messages being better in some ways, but both directs and replies have their benefits and drawbacks. The deciding factors for me in going with @replies were:1. Means that I don’t have to keep track of who’s following LOTD, which is a big simplification and reduces API calls required.2. Means that LOTD doesn’t have to follow people back before they can post, so better user experience (people can post immediately, when they’re excited about it) and fewer API calls required.3. @replies get a bit of a viral thing going, since people other than the LOTD bot see the posts and can click through to see who this @lotd is.Again, there are pluses and minuses for both approaches — I just went with what seemed to make the most sense to me at the time. Could be interesting keep it as @replies and integrate some additional functionality via d message, though…
I think it would be great if you could subscribe to certain people’s lotdposts and certain keywords in lotd posts
Would be great to be able to write a song by randomly recombing lotd’s and put it to music. This with the idea that these lyrics have been handpicked out of the many that you hear which is indicative of its power to move or communicate or at least inspire response. Powerful lyrics act like an incantation or mantra. Anyway lotd’s is a great idea. Makes me feel connected to something greater. Just like twitter does! Kudo’s to the creator!!!
I have really enjoyed this. It has prompted a few ideas for other ‘nodal analysis’. For @lotd, what would it take to integrate to iTunes so I could simply have a twitter button on iTunes? What about posting @lotd with a tinyurl to link to iTunes, iLike or amazon?
The hype machine has a feature where if you want, it will twitter everytimeyou ³love² a trackfred
new boss is same boss as the old boss…the whoGallows PoleTraditional (Arr. Jimmy Page/Robert Plant)http://risa.co.uk/sla/song….Save me from the wrath of this man, man.Hangman, hangman, upon your face a smile,Pray tell me that I’m free to ride,Ride for many mile, mile, mile.Oh, yes, you got a fine sister,She warmed my blood from cold,We warmed my blood to boiling hotTo keep you from the Gallows Pole,Your brother brought me silver,Your sister warmed my soul,But now I laugh and pull so hardAnd see you swinging on the Gallows Pole…Keep-a-swingin’!
I love this and use it, but I’d like to see one for movie quotes too. Do you guys know if any exist or if you have plans to make one?
Good idea. But I don’t know many movie quotes so its not my thing.Register a twitter account you like and then send me an email and I can intro you