Geek Friday #2: Five New Hacks/Apps That We Don’t Dislike
There was a time when a “hack” could only be a girl in a trench coat with a reporter’s notebook or an affable chap with stumble, who enjoys talking at you, at length and in encyclopedic detail, about cricket. Much-like the word ‘garage’ - which no longer can be assumed to mean gas-guzzled rock 'n’ roll - the word 'hack’ has been hijacked by a new generation, and they’re not butchers or suffering from some sort of lung disease.
Whereas a life-hack, which may involve anything from Ikea furniture to managing your inbox, is rather like a computer game cheat, a hack hack, is usually something made on a computer by someone with a hacker mentality. Don’t let thoughts of Angelina as a cyber-punk, snogging Jonny Lee Miller, distract you… A lot of the sorts of guys (and ladies) who 'hack’, a decade or two ago would be the weird geography-teacher dude in the background on Top of the Pops creating the textural sounds on a synth. Suddenly, dealing with drummers and stage fright seems sort of quaint, and these folks can now be found using technology to mash the digital realm into something different, better, stronger, smarter…
These 'hacks’ use APIs - which are a bit like open doors providing access to a sites code - where anyone can take information and present it differently or merge it with other data, to create something unique. Or to continue the musical analogy, it’s not unlike hip-hops use of samples or conceptually a million miles from the mash-up, in essence creating something new, using sounds or in this case, code, that already exists (and imagination, and skillz!). As the web grows, so does its overwhelmingness and poor architecture, and for those of a nerdier persuasion, the ability to re-imagine some of the biggest websites in the world, like The Guardian, colliding with the inclination to create simple, single purpose tools or mutant combinations of multipule data sets, is a helluva lot easier that starting a start-up and far more exciting than 'wouldn’t it be cool if…’ pub chatter. For a lot of developers and designers, these hacks are a great oppotunity to learn and/or show off.
The 'hack’ world has really grown over the past few years and there are now even specially organized 'hack days’ in most major cities - most notably Music Hack Day, where a room full of t-shirt wearing types, with their pizza crumb covered laptops, construct new things using the back-ends of sites like Soundcloud and Songkick. For instance, at Music Hack Day, someone could take your listening history data on Last.fm and compare it with a database of movie soundtracks, and suggest films you might like to watch which feature acts or tracks you like (can someone make this for us?).
Here are five new hacks we found and liked this week…
BBCify
http://fest.bewhere.co.uk/bbc
There are lot of sites and services out there suffixed with -ify, ranging from Playlistify (which makes your playlists service agnostic, turning Spotify playlists into Youtube playlists) to Pitchify (which recommends things to listen to by taking reviews from sites such as Pitchfork and DrownedinSound, and provides links to the albums on Spotify). BBCify, does, as the name suggests, Spotify playlists based on BBC content. Specifically, it’s based on the playlists and shows on BBC Radio 1 & 2, and 6Music, allowing us to listen to the last 100 tracks played on Lauren Laverne’s show.
Blog Finder
http://ex.fm/labs/blogfinder
If you’ve ever crate-dug for a good music blog, you’ll be aware there’s 50 traffic-chasing twerps with no coherent taste for every golden blog, filled with mp3s, wit and wisdom. Blog finder suggests blogs you might like, based on bands you love. It’s contextual and simple, and goes to show $750k didn’t land in ex.fm’s laps without merit.
Seamless
http://fivedetails.com/seamless
This neato little trick does for music what Kindle does for book-marking on multiple devices. This exists because there is someone, somewhere, who’s been in dire need of an app that seamlessly allows you to listen to a song on your MacBook and walk out the door with it playing on your iPhone, without missing a beat. Yaarn doesn’t need such an app as we only listen to ear-worms and they’re always with us, wherever we go, whenever we want them (sometimes when we don’t want them).
Later.fm
http://later.fm
This is really useful for anyone who leaves multiple tabs open to listen to a bunch of tracks or for anyone wanting to make themselves a playlist of MP3s, Soundcloud streams or Tumblr audio posts. Much like the brilliant Instapaper for marking things to “read later” this is also a button that you drag and drop into your browser bar, and you simply bash “listen later” to add it to your playlist. Simple, useful and the site’s founder told Yaarn he’s thinking about adding Youtube, Vimeo and some other sites too.
Readstream
http://readstreamapp.com/
Saving the best for last, this app allows you to skim through all the latest links in your Twitter feed in one prettier place. It saves you having to trudge through people moaning about the weather or bitching with their girlfriend in public, in order to find that must-read link on the NYT. Users of Flipboard on the iPad will be very familiar with this format and those that aren’t, it only takes a few seconds to realise this is going to save a lot of 'monitoring’ your tweet stream. Bra-f'in-vo!
whitneymcn
yaarnfounders-blog
winenutnyc
mydailycoffee
exfm
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jessicaivypage-blog
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