rob’s blog

There is some interesting discussion going on in the Facebook Developer’s forum. The gist is that Facebook has made changes that are causing some developers to feel disenfranchised. A few developers are upset enough that they are speaking of creating a union of independent Facebook application developers.

What might the goals of a union of Facebook application developers be? It would help to look at what has stirred the pot recently. About two weeks ago someone posted a complaint that Facebook had unfairly bent the rules to give CBS’s Sports NCAA bracket application advantages for faster viral spread across the Facebook user base. Adding insult to injury, the thread also pointed out that the CBS Sports NCAA bracket application had a poor user rating.

Two days ago another developer posted a thread titled, “Facebook has stolen my idea!” which describes the recently added “Do you know these people?” page on Facebook. The developer suggests he feels “cheated” because the new Facebook page duplicates his own application’s functionality. The developer’s application was forced to comply with platform development rules that required an obstructive approval process in order work correctly.

Facebook’s “Do you know these people?” page circumvents this approval process because it is not subject to the rules independent application developers must follow. Facebook made a better version of the application a part of the Facebook experience by bending the rules that crippled the original developer’s work. Continue Reading »

I spent a good portion of the day today refactoring the database used to power the Dave Matthews Band application I’ve been writing for Facebook.

I’ve been interested in writing for Facebook for some time because I believe that companies need to be expanding their online presence into applications built for major social networking platforms. It is easy to say that people should pay attention to things like OpenSocial or Facebook’s API, there have been plenty of articles about it. But nothing can convince you like building and running one yourself.

My application began with only allowing users to choose a photo for their profile. Then I added the ability to select prior Dave Matthews Band shows. The problem came when people said they wanted to show their tour history further back than 2007.

I’ve been sourcing my data from the DMB Almanac, a site that I promote fairly heavily through the Weekly Davespeak’s front page and in the forums. I have a feeling I send them a good portion of traffic. Continue Reading »

One of my colleagues at Babson asked me how my Dave Matthews Band website ranks against others on the internet. I had a bit of a cloudy answer so I decided to have a look this evening. I was surprised to find that it appears Weekly Davespeak overtook Nancies.org in reach and page views sometime earlier this year. Reach measures the number of users who frequent a website, measured as a percentage of all website visitation.

Weekly Davespeak still lags Antsmarching.org by a wide margin, but I’m preparing some changes and a new service for WDS that has the potential to act as a game changer. It will take time, community effort, but I think that WDS could become achieve the lion’s share of Dave Matthews Band traffic within two years.

Radiohead may know music–but they and their management do not know digital downloads. In trying to be artsy, buying In Rainbows was confusing and clunky. When it came time to download, they couldn’t handle the traffic. I found that particularly startling because a band with that kind of IT budget should have been able to get a decently distributed web server set up in 10 days.

Anyhow, three cheers for Saul Williams and his management for connecting with Musicane on the pre-order of his new album Niggy Tardust. (Yes, that is a racially charged album title. This guy has some pretty serious stuff to say to you.)

Musicane’s system for doing the pre-order was the slickest I’ve seen yet, offering a pre-order download of the 192kbps version for free or you could pay $5 and have access to 192kbps, 300kbps, or FLAC. I paid the $5 and it was worth it! Continue Reading »

[Updated 10/31/07, see bottom of post]

I had a professor ask me for more information on what made OiNK special and what it was all about. I assembled the following information for him:

Why Oink Was Special

• The community was very tightly controlled:
  • Only albums that had a certain level of audio quality (192kbps+) were allowed to be uploaded. Albums had to fit a stringent set of criteria such as being original rips from real CDs, and not “transcodes.” A transcode is a song that has been ripped to mp3, decoded back to wav, and then re-encoded to an mp3. This was despite the fact that many feel double compression is not noticeable to the ear.
  • All torrents had to fulfill certain basic requirements such as a complete tracklisting. A basic description, accurate meta data, cover art scans and a playlist file were highly encouraged and more often than not taken care of by the uploader.
• The community was self-policing and highly active. Torrents of albums were uploaded weeks sometimes months in advance of their official date. High profile albums were combed over very quickly and rejected if either they appeared to be transcodes or had been doctored in any way.

Continue Reading »

I performed a number of upgrades this weekend to help keep my web software up to date. I’m looking at this new media wiki / vBulletin integration called vBwiki Pro and before I tantalize myself with the possibility of adding the software I knew I needed to bring all of my web stuff up to current version first.

I’m running Drupal as the CMS on Weekly Davespeak, vBulletin in the forums and Wordpress for this blog.

Upgrades are usually pretty easy, although I did a ton of Drupal customizations when I installed it last year and was worried I would overwrite some of my work.

Continue Reading »

Surprise, a complete install of Windows Media Player in Windows Vista does not provide the necessary .dll files needed to play WMA or ASX files in Firefox. This means that if you do a fresh install of Windows Vista and Firefox 2.x and try to listen to an archived program on kexp.org you’re going to get that this ugly little window: Continue Reading »