ModifiedLogic

I find that following somewhere around 50 people on Twitter is a "sweet spot". I don’t like to follow to many people because I inevitably miss things. It’s hard enough forgetting to check my replies. I miss enough of those as it is.

There are so many ways to connect to social networking, microblogs, and other web based services these days. When you sign up for Friendfeed or Socialthing or any of the updaters like ping.fm or hellotxt, you are greeted with a sea of icons for many many different services. You have video, social, micro, news, rss, pictures, music, books, misc, and just about any other web service out there.

If you’re like me, you use many of these services. If you’re like me, you do want to share this info with everyone. But it has become increasingly harder to keep track of it all and even more difficult to filter out the noise. In some respects it goes hand in hand.

Take Friendfeed as an example. I’m currently only following about 10 people on that site. By default "friend of a friend" updates are shown, so you can multiply that 10 people by 2 or 3 at any given time. Friendfeed is just a sea of text. If you follow any of the "weblebrities", their posts usually yield many comments. Those posts keep getting to the top of my page after being commented on for over 24 hours. So sea of text plus a few weblebrities equals a lot of noise. I’ve been reading about everyone’s favorite peanut butter on Friendfeed for the past two days because it keeps floating to the top. I suppose I could just hide it.

A service like Friendfeed needs something like groups that you can create and customize. This way, I could make a "weblebrities" group where I would add Kevin Rose, Veronica Belmont, Chris Pirillo, and iJustine and keep them and all of their ever growing popularity in a "cage". Furthermore, I could keep real life friends in the "real life" group.

Friendfeed isn’t the only service that would benefit from this. Um…like…everything in which you add people could benefit from this. In turn, all of the apps and services that connect to these benefited outfits would…uhh…benefit. Alert Thingy would be more than just a prettier copy of the sea of text.

So it’s easy. Too much noise equals disorganization. How to you organize disorganized data? With groups baby. Or labels, or containers, or folders, or whatever. We’re just looking for some kind of UI options that make many things easier to see. Kind of like how folders work in the gReader. I’m sure the minds behind these services will figure it out and implement "groups" in an even cooler way than I’m thinking.

One of my top wants/needs for the iPhone is the ability to scrobble audio tracks to last.fm. I recently re-jailbroke my iPhone using ZiPhone and installed Mobilescrobbler. Now, a big piece of the "scrobbling puzzle" is filled in.

Mobilescrobbler is a full featured last.fm client. It allows you to listen to your last.fm radio (loved tracks, person radio, neighborhood), scrobble tracks, check lyrics, friends, artist info, love tracks, ban them, skip them, and more. Seriously, it covers just about everything you can do with the last.fm desktop client. It does all of this over wi-fi OR edge.

Now, every app has to have it’s "cool" feature right? Well, Mobilescrobbler supports iPhone gestures. Swipe and pinch away.

Sometimes, people ask me why I like last.fm so much and why scrobbling is so important to me. There are many reasons, but here are the first few that come to mind:

1. I like many many different kinds of music. Rather than talking about them all, I can say, go look at my last.fm page.

2. It helps me, and others, keep track of what I listen to. If I hear a new band from someone’s share iTunes library or on last.fm radio, there is a record of it. I can go back and see exactly what I was listening to at what time. In a lot of cases, now you can listen to full streaming tracks as well.

3. Finding new artists is a huge part of the equation. You can generate a radio station for say, bands that sound like Coheed and Cambria. For a person like me who likes to constantly discover new music, it’s a no brainer. Mix that with the rest of the social aspects of last.fm and the new music discovery possibilities are near infinite.

Getting back to Mobilescrobbler. The app itself is a big part of the puzzle, but there are still a few missing pieces, for me at least. The big picture to me is, being able to scrobble any and all music from any source. With Mobilescrobbler, it covers me at home, anywhere I have my iPhone including the car and walking. For my particular audio sources, I’m only missing audio played on say, my Xbox 360 or on my Sirius radio. Do we need to go that far? I’m not sure. But I’d like to.

The end result is, I am very happy with what Mobilescrobbler gives me. I’d say that now, at least 75% of the music I listen to will be scrobbled, and that’s just cool.

Currently myself and many others are experiencing an issue with Twitter that is apparently not allowing the display of most friends’ tweets. A few people have suggested that you can unfollow/re-follow a friend to fix it, but if you are following many people, it can become tedious.

According to the following status update now showing on everyone’s home page, tweets are in fact "going through", they just can’t be seen.

With these latest Twitter outage/errors, I realized that I would be willing to pay for Twitter.

I currently pay the $9.00 every 3 months for last.fm to hopefully contribute to service, development, and the "My Radio Station" feature. Another thing I pay for is the $24.99 a year for a premium flickr account. I use both of those services quite a bit, but I use Twitter more.

If it meant more uptime, more features, etc…I would pay a small fee for Twitter in a heartbeat.

In all of this confusion with the current issues, I found this Twitter account that spits out status updates and bugs. Friend it up if you want the latest straight from inner twitter. http://twitter.com/twitter_status