Twitter Town Hall?
Seems to be a familiar pattern. A really rockingly useful service is launched in somebody’s kitchen, and after a bit of initial hesitation, all the early adopters jump in and with them, the API gets thoroughly rinsed and spun. For a while, everything is wonderful. Then as the crowd that follows the early majority start plunging in and Scoble, Hawk et al blog and digg and whatever else it is they do, the lovely useful service starts falling over. Databases fail, servers can’t handle the traffic, bandwidths are not wide enough or bandy.
Looks like Twitter is sitting squarely at this point now. The Web2 crowdsourcer of choice for the Birmingham Bloggernuts and the Newcastle BarCampers is being hammered all around the blogland, and ironically enough on its own service, for um, being down a lot.
Probably time for Google to buy them, isn’t it? For gazillions of dollars?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if for once, one of these startups came up with a better business model that allowed them to stay relatively stable without going all anodyne and corporate, and with it, borderline rude and inaccessible? That one or two of the many thousands of these creative devs could get together in a back yard or over the garage and make something work without big fat cheques? WordPress seems to manage it ok.
If you’re still thinking wtf is Twitter for, exactly? Join up, add some people you know irl and find out. And try these: Twhirl, Hashtags, xFruits and the Fb app that links your Tweets to your status update.
Not only but also:
made by Pete
made by Jon
Think we need one for On the Metro? Sam, Alex?
Popularity: 11% [?]
Surface Unsigned
A new bands “competition” that is making entrants buy/sell at least 25 tickets for their own gig at £6 each is trying to get the rather magnificent and award winning Created in Birmingham take down their review, where they quote said terms and conditions. Here they are, courtesy oh just about everyone in Birmingham blogland:
“As you must bring with you at least 25 people to your event you must sell at least 25 tickets for each round you play. If you do not sell 25 tickets you will still be allowed to play however you will NOT progress to the next round no matter how many Surface Ratings you receive.”
After receiving what looks to be a rather ill worded and legally tenuous takedown notice, CiB reproduced the T&C in LOLspeak:
“Oh hai! For to plai at event ur ordiance can haz 25 pipple. U muzt sell 25 tikkits 4 eech gig ur in. If u can not haz cell 25 tikkits u can still haz plai but ur band will NOT go froo 2 necks rawnd no matta haw mannie Sourfice Raiteens U getz. Kthnxbai!”
If there’s nothing wrong with the T&C of the competition, why try to hide them? Or is it that the organisers don’t want the bands to know? Tsk. To quote Danny:
“I would love to see the same structure applied to a regular night were six or so unsigned band played half an hour each and split the door, giving relatively new bands a chance to cut their teeth and punters a regular night to sample a section of the local scene.“
Quite right. How often are young artists, pretty much desperate for exposure, being exploited? Is that what’s actually going on here? Do feel free to blog about this if you’ve an opinion. Links will be um, linked. That’s how it works.
Photo credit © Lee Arkless, venue photographer at Newcastle’s Carling Academy
Popularity: 6% [?]
LiveBrum is - LIVE!
Much effort has recently been applied to what is certainly the best What’s On website around. Live Brum is the brainchild of Josh Hart, co-founder of the mighty Made Media and benevolent host to lots of tiny community-type websites, although he never talks about those.
Apart from a really friendly look and feel, the big, clever usp of LiveBrum is its use of RSS. There are individual feeds for absolutely everything, so you can sign up for just folk, or just gigs at the Drum, or theatre, and if you’ve something to say, a review or just an opinion, you can subscribe to a feed of the comments. For a final stroke of genius, there’s embedding.
It’s brilliant: every city needs one. Congratulations!
Popularity: 3% [?]