Would you like to listen to music a friend is playing, at the same time as them?

With spotify.fm you now can.

It is an experiment in musical serendipity.

Sometimes the best way to find new things is to just follow someone else.

No clever systems. Just people.

When a friend plays a track you love, you want to punch the air and send them a thank you. It’s brilliant.

Near realtime shared experiences are fab.

Heavily inspired by Olinda by Berg.

More detail

The app is basically a mashup of the last.fm and Spotify.

I find the list of friends playing music (scrobbled by last.fm) and then when the friend is selected, I find the track with the Spotify Metadata API.

I then launch the spotify specific URL and spotify plays it. I refresh the webpage at the end of the song to get the new track.

This is obviously very experimental and very buggy – just highlighting a feature spotify *should* have.

Future developments / Bugs

Ads get in the way and cause the timings to go bezerk.

People can load their own music into spotify – which you cannot play.

Some tracks are only available to premium subscribers or people in certain countries.

I would like to make it a chrome plugin or a desktop app

Thanks to the opensource community as I’m using a Last.FM API class and a tweaked Spotify Metadata API wrapper.

The code is very buggy. It’ll be up on github soon.

I would love someone at last.fm to get in touch as I could speed things up if they tweaked their API for me.

Thanks to @iamdanw, @mikesten and @willsh for testing it and giving me some top feedback.

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Today is ‘Blue Monday’ – The most depressing day of the year. So naturally people have a moan and a whinge (only human). However, a *lot* of people do this on Facebook and unknowingly let the world see what they have said. When you are slagging off your boss this can only be a very silly thing to do.

So to highlight this sillyness, I created – Hate My Job. It scans the Facebook opengraph for status updates containing the words ‘hate my job’ and then shows you them. All of this information is publicly available, update, image and their name. I chose not to display their name but I did show their image.

Inspired by “Evil” by Tom Scott and this tweet by Edward Boches.

*Edit – I should say that Dr Ben Goldacre has a great post showing that ‘Blue Monday’ is a PR exercise, invented by a holiday company to sell more travel. But is it now embedded into culture, is Blue Monday here to stay?

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Check the video.

They’ve also create a neat little google maps mashup showing the location of the Mini and where the players are.

On the surface it sounds like loads of fun, and I wish I could play the game to try out the design as I’ve got quite a few questions on how it plays out.

I can’t help wonder that they might have got the game mechanic slightly wrong. Basically this game is Halo Oddball played out in the real world but there is one key difference. In Oddball, the winner of the game is the person who has held onto the ball for the longest.

When you have the ball you can’t fire so you have to run like a headless chicken away from the hordes of people after you. When you don’t have the ball, everyone is piling in to get the ball. It’s a really skillful and tactical game and one you can be winning and losing every other second – This game is just total carnage.

With the Mini game, as the winner is the person who is holding onto the car at the end, there really isn’t any gameplay advantage for me to go get the car until near the very end. They’ve made the game area quite small and the prize large, so people will be stealing the car off each other but I just think if they’ve used the Oddball scoring system the game would have had a much better game dynamic.

You could argue that by making the game the way they did, they made it easy for new players to join at any time. Pro’s and con’s to both but I think the game would have relied on a lot more skill and cunning the Oddball way rather than just being ‘lucky’ to be the person who has the car at the end of the game.

This isn’t a criticism of their idea as it is brave, on brand and on strategy. Big plaudits to everyone who worked so hard on it as we need more of this type of work.

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So it still surprises me when I see media placements of messages that make absolutely no sense. We all know that creative has to be delivered with context.

Here are a couple of examples.

The Economist

I really like this work. Lovely illustration, great use of the double ad space to deliver the dual message. But look at the call to action.

For a free copy text IRAN to 60300.

Fantastic I can get a free copy. But…Hang on a minute. I’m underground. Waiting  for the tube. Unless the TFL has secretly installed a way to use my phone underground (which they haven’t) then it isn’t going to work. It would have taken no time or money to have dropped / switched the CTA and run new creative for these placements. They’ve even put a custom keyword on the ad to track it…so close…yet so far.

Cherly Cole

This again is really really good in theory. You check into a poster via Facebook places to win a prize. Brilliant you all say. But look at the poster below.

This looks a little fake so I’m not sure it is real…But taking it as real…it looks like a very very busy and fast moving road. Am I really going to get my phone while driving (and thus breaking the law) to check into a poster. Are the passengers in the going to do this? I would actually say it is impossible for someone to see that poster, register I have to do something, open Facebook, get a GPS lock and check in all within about 5 seconds. Why bother putting a message on a poster that is useless. They could either changed the messaging or just dropped the placement and saved some money.

You could argue that the Facebook messaging is so obscure it doesn’t affect the main message but I would disagree.

The advertising industry has to grow up. Clear communication of creative is the core of the industry. New advances in technology are rapidly changing how the public choose to interact with those brand messages. It is getting incredibly complex to manage and if you can’t deliver a clear message on a poster then I fear the worst when you tackle the hard stuff.

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The time taken to add your ‘data’ to Dopplr is something you really don’t mind as the benefits outweigh the ‘cost’.

What if you could record data about anything and visualise this in a personal report?

Nicholas Feltron has been doing just that for quite a few years – collecting everything any and every piece of mundane information and visualising them beautifully in his annual Feltron reports.

Daytum was created as a way for Nicholas to store all of this information. You sign into site and add a ‘thing’ with an ‘amount’ – cigarette : 1

This then gets logged into the system with a timestamp and as you smoke you keep updating the site. A mobile twitter interface is thankfully on hand as updating your data via a website is a chore upon a chore. Now you just have to tweet your ‘thing’ with your ‘amount. A similar system called your.flowing.data created by Nathan Yau is entirely built on top of twitter to store your data.

These are systems for the committed – You have to be in the mindset to fire off a tweet to record that thing.

Can objects we naturally interact with start to share the data they store?

The Wifi body scale is automated and is single minded in what it records.

Another great example is the Sleep Cycle iphone app – It is an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are in the lightest part of your sleep cycle. It does this by monitoring how you are moving while you sleep – the phone accelerometer registers your motion and figures out the best point you can wake up. Aside from sleeping better,  the app produces a variety of graphs to help you understand your sleep cycle.

So can we automate the collection of any data without changing our normal behaviour?

Poyozo could be the development that does this ->

Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.

So if we could be generating our own automated annual Feltron reports. What insights could they offer? Could they offer insights into our behaviour and moods

I was having a lovely lunch time chat with Mike Stenhouse about this very subject – He has been exploring a lot of these ways to visualise connections between data at trampoline systems and also in his own time. He started explain some of the prototypes he had built, gave some brilliant examples i’d never heard of and we chewed over some other random scenarios.

Did you gain weight one week (wifi scales) because you ate at a certain restaurant (foursquare) or you went on a business trip (dopplr). Were you sad at work  one day (twitter), listening to incredibly depressing music (last.fm) and searching for a new job (bookmarks) and buying something to cheer youself (purchases). Could the report then identity that you were the happiest on a certain day or offer some insight into why.

Would be eventually be drowning in data from our lives and eventually be finding patterns with no meaning? Maybe so, but I for one would love to try it and see.

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Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.

Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

Via Spime

Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?

What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?

An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.

Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.

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The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.

As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.

As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.

The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.

It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.

The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.

The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.

Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.

The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.

The exhibition is open till April 19th.

More high quality photographs on the Creative Review blog.

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So back to OpenFrameworks. I met Joel Gethin Lewis last year when we were building the Christmas Card Making Machine and he introduced me to how he was doing face tracking and all this sexy stuff.  He was writing everything in OpenFrameworks and I was astounded to learn this wasn’t some fancy custom solution he had used when he was at U.V.A, but a free open source system.

To explain what OpenFrameworks is, I’m going to be a bit simplistic so bear with me – It is basically a way of wrapping up all the really really nasty bits to do with programming graphics, sound, interaction etc and opening this up so with a few lines of code you can load in images, have them move around, control them etc. It was astoundingly simple.

Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson the lead developers of the project have created community which was born out of a desire to ease new comers into the complexities of programming. The other beautiful part of this equation is that the community actively develop and put code back into the eco-system. Open source programming is not a new thing, but it is incredibly interesting to see this in more competitive artist circles (as generally OpenFrameworks is used to create installations and art projects) and along with Processing there is a whole new breed interactive artists doing great work.

The course was held at UCL and was setup by Ruairi who runs the excellent Interactive Architecture site and Joel and the multi talented Memo Atken were running the course. The ratio of architects on the course was very high and this was really interesting to find out what they are doing with code when it comes to designing buildings – They are all very keen on generating whole buildings from code. Little snippets of a process can be fed into a generative loop and out will pop a whole building – This is staggering stuff and for them incredibly liberating. Let’s just hope they don’t become too seduced by the computer as buildings need that irrevernce that lifts them.

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Guardian – Open Platform – The entire guardian newspaper (and many years of archive material) all available to use via an API.

Guardian – Data Store – An incredible resource of data – Everything from ‘Champagne imports’ to ‘Swine Flu cases’. All available as Excel Spreadsheets.

New York Times – I believe they were the first newspaper to open their content via an API.

Wattson – If you’ve ever wanted to know how much electricity you consume then the Wattson is for you – You clip it to your electricity supply and it collates all the usage info. You can then interface with the API to start to play with the data.

Pachube – Taking the Wattson to a much higher level – Pachube is a dataset collated from buildings – Lots of environmental data to play with – building temperatues, humidity, lights. Building 2.0 here we come.

Last.FM – The API has exposed a mass of user data regarding music usage.

Flickr - Photographs on tap with a very comprehensive API. Very well documented.

Programmable Web – A great resource of APIs and datasets.

Trynt – Lots of APIs to use including an IMDB API.

Open Government Data – An initiative led by Microsoft publishing data from governments.

Timetric.com – Lots of data with an API.

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Processing – The environment of all the experts – I think processing is very easy to pick up and learn but you will need to work at writing code. The forthcoming ‘Beautiful Data’ book might be a good way in.

Many Eyes – A very usable way to create quite straightforward datavisualisations – Created by IBM.

Flare – A set of libraries for Flash which let you prototype visualisations – you do need Flash knowledge for this.

Arduino – Linking physical objects to the internet a la ‘Physical Internet’ has really started to interest me and there is a growing crowd of people ‘Doing it with others’ – The Arduino is a very simple to use piece of electronics that can be flashed to control devices or transmit data to the internent. Thanks to Make and Instructables – There has never been an easier time to break out the soldering iron and get building.

Yahoo Pipes - Even non coders can start to play with data – Using Yahoo pipes you can take all sorts of data feeds and aggregate them together to manipulate them.

Flowing Data – Nathan is a curator of data and  stats – Flowing data is a superb resource for more traditional forms of data vis. He also created ‘your flowing data’ which is a system of capturing data through a mobile interface and twitter. Sort of like daytum.

Serial Cosign -A great resource.

Visual Complexity – A great resource.

Infosthetics – A great resource.

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