Lastfm Love Tweet

New default tweet - Now with Amazon links!

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:36:56 -0400

As of this posting amazon links will be included in the default tweet format for new users!

The amazon links have been in test for a few weeks, and they seem to be working properly.

As always there are a number of ways to customize your tweet format described in the how to posts.

Peter

New (easier) ways to customize your tweets!

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:20:00 -0400

I think one of the cool features of lastfmlovetweet is the ability to customize your tweet. Currently about 8% of users have custom tweets, and while I have always wanted it to be more, I chalked it up to complexity.

Well, no more excuses folks! I am happy to introduce 2 new ways to customize your tweets.

I. Choose your own tweet format

Here are a bunch of possible tweet formats for you to choose from: (1st the format and then an example tweet.)

#lastfm #love %t by %a - lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_album_or_track]
#lastfm #love Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi - lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/3rAt4
#lastfm #love %t by %a - lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_uk_album_or_track]
#lastfm #love Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi - lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/Z3e3C
#lastfm #love %t by[ %a] %l
#lastfm #love Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
♥ %t by %a lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_album_or_track]
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/3rAt4
♥ %t by %a lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_uk_album_or_track]
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/Z3e3C
♥ %t by %a %l
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
I ♥ %t by %a lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_album_or_track]
I ♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/3rAt4
I ♥ %t by %a lastfm: %l[ amazon: %amazon_uk_album_or_track]
I ♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi lastfm: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt amazon: http://bit.ly/Z3e3C
I ♥ %t by %a %l
I ♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
♥ %t by %a ☊ %l [$ %amazon_album_or_track]
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi ☊ http://bit.ly/Wc1mt $ http://bit.ly/3rAt4
♥ %t by %a ☊ %l [£ %amazon_uk_album_or_track]
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi ☊ http://bit.ly/Wc1mt £ http://bit.ly/Z3e3C

If you want to use one of them, just send an @ or d message to lastfm_love as follows (In this example I am choosing tweet format 4):

@lastfm_love tweet format 4

Thats it! Sending this message will set your tweet format to the 4th option on the list. (If this feature gets used, I’ll add more options.)

II. Copy someone elses format

So, the format you want isn’t on the list, but you’re reading your twitter stream and you see the coolest lastfmlovetweet format on the whole interwebs. Well, guess what? You can copy that format for yourself! And its EASY! All you have to do is @ or d the following to lastfm_love (Just substitute with the twitter username)):

@lastfm_love tweet format @

Easy enough? So no more excuses!!! Customize that tweet!!!!!

Amazon links update (still in beta, but works ok)

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:50:00 -0400

*** UPDATE - just to be clear, these links are available to all users to try. I am just keeping this in beta because it is still a little rough around the edges. The only thing I see changing at this point would be more links types added, and better accuracy in the results. ***

A few new links - Here is a list of all amazon links you can add to your tweet:

%amazon_album - link to the album’s mp3s on amazon
%amazon_uk_album - link to the album’s mp3s on amazon uk
%amazon_track - link to the track’s mp3 on amazon
%amazon_uk_track - link to the track’s mp3 on amazon uk
%amazon_album_or_track - First tries to get the album, if it can’t find it, gets the track.
%amazon_uk_album_or_track - First tries to get the album, if it can’t find it, gets the track. (uk)

I recommend using the last 2 links, as they have the best chance of generating a good link to amazon. US and UK are the only amazon stores that support the mp3 search, so thats all I support for now. If you want a different country, let me know and if I get enough interest, I’ll see what I can do. (Like link to the CD, but does anyone buy CDs anymore?)

Full instructions on updating your tweet format are here.

Amazon links are here! (For testing)

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:46:00 -0400

I have implemented links to amazon album and track pages. This is currently a test period, so the only way to use them is to add them to your custom tweet format. Details on how to set a custom tweet format can be found here.

The only differences are that now there are 2 additional variables you can use:

%amazon_album - links to the mp3s for the album
%amazon_track - links to the mp3 for the track

AND the tweet format now supports ‘sections’. Sections work as follows:

Lets say you have a tweet format as follows:

I just LOVED ‘%t’ by ‘%a’! Buy it on amazon at %amazon_album

Now, since we are all very hip, and listen to some very underground music, what happens when amazon doesn’t have anything by the artist? What happens when the search of amazon comes up empty?

Well, this is what would happen:

I just LOVED ‘Leo the Great’ by ‘The Windsor Terrace All Stars’! Buy it on amazon at

hmmm. Not so good. Well, thats where ‘sections’ come into play. If I set my tweet format as follows:

I just LOVED ‘%t’ by ‘%’! [Buy it on amazon at %amazon_album]

Then if there was no value for %amazon_album, the whole section (between the square brackets) would be ignored. Then my tweet would look like:

I just LOVED ‘Leo the Great’ by ‘The Windsor Terrace All Stars’!

Much better, right?

So, there you have it. Let the amazon linking commence, oh, and please leave any questions, comments, suggestions, thoughts, etc. in the comments below or feel free to contact me on twitter.

Peter

What about buy links?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:52:37 -0500

As lastfmlovetweet has grown, I have been considering adding buy links to the end of the tweets. These links would point to the loved track’s album on Amazon.com and an affiliate account would be embedded into the link.

In thinking about the best way to go about this I have come up with a number of ideas that I would like to share and hopefully get some feedback on or generate some discussion.

1. I don’t want to force buy links on any of my users.

2. I would be happy to share the revenue (meager as it may be) with my users by allowing you to have your amazon affiliate ID (if you have one) inserted into the links on your loved tracks some percentage of the time. (50/50?)

3. While I wouldn’t change the default format for my current users, I would like to add the buy link to the default format of new users once its implemented.

4. Users would be allowed to remove the buy links either by opting out, or by setting the custom tweet format to not include them.

5. I may instead have the buy links appear on a percentage of the tweets that the user can specify with some minimum value.

I guess what I’m trying to do is balance my desire to generate some revenue from lastfmlovetweet, add value to the service by giving readers of the tweet a quick way to buy the track, and at the same time to not alienate you, my users. Am I being overly cautious about this? Would you not care in the least if I added buy links? Would you even notice? Or would having buy links on the tweets drive you away?

You input on this is very imprtant to me! Please feel free to comment below, or contact me on twitter. Thanks!

Oh, and if anyone wants to pilot the buy links let me know. I expect to start testing sometime next week.

Peter

Import your loved tracks into tumblr (or just about anywhere)

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:16:00 -0500

*** UPDATE 3/27/09 After some experimentation, I am not happy with either a pipes solution or using a feed of twitter search results (described below). The best solution, I think, would be to use the tumblr API to generate the posts. That would allow me to include pictures, or other media to make the tumblr posts more than just tweets in tumblr. Any ideas are welcome, but this one may take some time, so please be patient! ***

*** UPDATE 2/26/09 Several users (myself included) are seeing some strange formatting problems when following this process - I will work on getting a yahoo pipe togather that fixes these problems. Stay tuned… ***

A user asked if there is a way to import your lastfmlovetweets into tumblr without having all of your tweets imported.

My first thought was to use yahoo pipes, but then I realizes that theres a much easier way that anyone can setup in just a few minutes.

Basically you want to do a search on twitter, and then grab the feed for that search and import the search results into tumblr. Make sense? Here are the steps broken down: (This assumes your tweets have the hashtags #lastfm #love - if they don’t you will have to make a search to suit your format.)

1. Go twitter’s search and enter the following search (using your twitter username instead of pootytang): #lastfm #love from:pootytang

2. Click on ‘search’ to get to the results screen.

3. Grab the feed for that query. (Right click on ‘Feed for this query’ and select ‘Copy link location’)

4. In another tab or window go to your tumblr dashboard and click on ‘customize’ and then ‘Feeds’

5. Paste the twitter ‘Feed for this query’ link from step 3 into the ‘Feed URL’ box.

6. You can decide whether to import as links, links with summaries, or Text without titles.

This process can be used to get your loved tracks pretty much anywhere that you can get an rss feed, so play around with it, and have fun!

If you do import your loved tracks into a tumblr blog, or anywhere else, please let me know in the comments of this post, as I would love to take a look!

Happy lastfmlovetweeting!

Peter

Where are my tweets?

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:30:00 -0500

Every now and again, I get a tweet asking if lastfmlovetweet is working, or why don’t I see my loved tracks? Here are some things you can check:

1. Is lastfmlovetweet down? The easiest way to check is view the search results from twitter. They will show you the most recent lastfmlovetweets, and are usually updating every few minutes.

2. Are your loves tracks being recorded on lastfm? To determine if you have loved a track recently, I check the feed provided at this link: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/pootytang/lovedtracks.rss To check your feed, copy that link and replace ‘pootytang’ with your lastfm username. The main reason your loved tracks wouldn’t show up is that lastfm only records the 1st time you love a track. Once you have loved the track, the next time you love it it won’t show up in your feed, and it wont generate a tweet.

3. Has your twitter password changed? If you have changed your twitter pasword, you need to re-sign up.

4. Is twitter up?

5. Have you angered the lastfmlovetweet genie? If you haven’t used lastfm in a month or more, it will take a little while (up to 4 hours) for the lastfm love bot to start checking your account. You can send an @ or dm to lastfm_love with the word ‘ping’ and the bot will start checking your account immediately.

Growing Pains

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:42:08 -0500

Over the last few weeks lastfmlovetweet has gone through some growing pains. Here is a summary of what happened, and what changed:

I. Uh Oh

I was on vacation with my family, and got home to find out that my web hosting provider decided I was abusing my account by running my little lastfmlovetweet ruby script every 10 minutes.

He had a point - let me explain: Each run of the lastfm_love ruby script generated about 1800 http requests to lastfm (to check each user for new loved tracks), and then 2 more requests for each tweet generated (One for the url shortening, and one to twitter). So, I was doing about 10,080 requests per hour, and parsing as many xml documents, so yeah, my host had a point - that isn’t what a shared hosting account is meant to be used for. So, he cut me down to only running once an hour, and told me to optimize my code. That meant that loved tracks would only show up once an hour. Many users of lastfmlovetweet love multiple tracks per hour, so some users were hours and hours behind. Not good.

II. I Had a Plan. The Plan was Flawed

Fear not though, as I had expected this day to come, and I had a plan. I already had a few yahoo pipes designed that would dramatically reduce the number of requests. Basically the pipe would allow me to group together 20 users at a shot, bringing 1800 down to 90. A huge difference. The code to use the yahoo pipe was old, but it didn’t require much work to get it working again. I just needed to test it out, and so I spent an afternoon doing just that. I got it working, and then pounded on it for a while. Good thing I did. Yahoo pipes is an amazing tool, but 100% reliable it is not. I found that it was failing a lot, and seemed to be sporadically giving me cached results which are useless to me.

III. VPS to the rescue

Virtual Private Server to the rescue! I really wanted to use amazon’s EC2, but for my purposes it was a bit pricey, so after looking around a bit I decided that my current host’s VDS service was fine for my needs (the devil you know…) I spent a few more hours configuring and testing the VDS and officially moved to it Monday night (Jan. 26th). It’s been running beautifully since then.

IV. Threads

In addition to moving to a VDS, I also modified my code to use ruby threads so I can grab multiple lastfm feeds at once. I currently grab 20 at a time and that cut the processing time from about 15 minutes down to about 5 minutes. Thats what allowed me to speed up the service so that it now polls every 6 minutes.

V. Follow limit

Ugg. Just when I thought things were going smoothly, I realized that the lastfmlovetweet bot was no longer able to follow new users. This is a problem, because updating the tweet format (and new unannounced features) require a direct message, and twitter accounts can only receive directs from people they follow. I’ve opened a ticket with twitter, but so far they haven’t lifted the cap. I think they capped my account in error - it is only supposed to kick in when your friendships are reciprocated - and one way or another I’m gonna get that cap lifted! In the meantime, I unfollowed a bunch of people that are no longer using the service, so I am once again below the 2000 threshold… for now…

VI. Whats next?

The response to lastfmlovetweet has been terrific, and its been a lot of fun for me. I have a number of new features coming out that I hope you will enjoy. In addition, I am thinking about ways to make any money from this service to recoup the monthly expense of my VDS and maybe have enough left over to buy a cup of coffee. More on that later.

Any ideas, suggestions, issues, comments, thoughts, musings, PLEASE leave comments!

Cusomize your tweet!!!

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:42:00 -0400

*** UPDATE 3/21/09 Added amazon variables ***

*** UPDATE 2/24/09 The @lastfm_love bot now treats @ and dm the same. You can update your tweet format by sending @lastfm_love just like you can with d lastfm_love. ***

Finally, you, my wonderful lastfmlovetweet user, can customize your tweet format to be whatever you like.
The default format has caused some dissatisfaction, and in polling you all to see what it should be it was clear that people had very different ideas. So, now it can be whatever your <3 (or ♥) desires.

Heres how it works:

You send a direct message or an @ reply to the lastfm_love user with the text you want (using the format described below), and then the lastfm_love user will set that to be your tweet format AND send you back a direct message with an example of how your format would look with your most recently loved track.

Examples:

For the example below I will use the track “Livin’ on a Prayer” by the inimitable Bon Jovi.
The current default is:
#lastfm #love Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
Lets say that you want your tweet to be:
I freakin’ LOVE Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi. It ROCKS! Check it out here: http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
Then the message you would send lastfm_love would be:
tweet format I freakin’ LOVE %t by %a. it ROCKS! Check it out here: %l
The first 2 words, “tweet format”, tell lastfm_love that you want to change your tweet format. The rest of the message is the format you want but the artist, track, and link are replaced by the following placeholders:

%a = artist
%t = track name
%l = lastfm link
%amazon_album_or_track - First tries to get the album, if it can’t find it, gets the track. (recommended)
%amazon_uk_album_or_track - First tries to get the album, if it can’t find it, gets the track. (uk) (recommended)
%amazon_album - link to the album’s mp3s on amazon
%amazon_uk_album - link to the album’s mp3s on amazon uk
%amazon_track - link to the track’s mp3 on amazon
%amazon_uk_track - link to the track’s mp3 on amazon uk

The other parts of the tweet (The “I freakin’ LOVE”, “by”, and “It ROCKS! Check it out here:”) are static text and dont change from tweet to tweet. The %a, %t, and %l (and amazon placeholders) get filled in with whatever track you just loved.

Testing

If you aren’t sure about whether your format is correct, and you just want to test it out, then add the work “test” after “tweet format” and your will receive the test message, but your tweet format will NOT be changed. For example, sending the following message:
tweet format test I freakin’ LOVE %t by %a. it ROCKS! Check it out here: %l
will cause the direct message response to be sent, but will NOT change your tweet format.

More examples:

tweet format:
♥ Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
message to send:
tweet format ♥ %t by %a %l

tweet format:
OMFG I ♥ Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer http://bit.ly/Wc1mt
message to send:
OMFG I ♥ %a’s %t %l

If Things go Wrong:

If you need to reset your tweet format back to the default, send the following message:
tweet format default

Welcome to the LastFMLoveTweet blog!

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:41:00 -0400

This blog will serve several functions:

Announce new features - I have a few ideas…
Status notifications - I will tweet the major status issues, such as extended service outages, but here I will post minor updates as well.
Discussion - This blog has disqus comments enabled, so some discussion can occur here.
How Tos - As I add new features, I will NOT be making them accessible via the web interface. Rather, they will be accessible via twitter. This is because I want the web page sign up process to be as simple as possible. Instructions for using advanced features will be available on this blog, and tagged with howto.

If there is anything else you want out of this blog, please let me know in the comments below. This project has been a lot of fun for me so far, and I greatly appreciate the interest and feedback I have received!