Nick Edelstein

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Creative Twitter Hurdles Simfy on FB

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Creative Commons guidant les contributeurs

Some very interesting things happened online today.Twitter launched a photo sharing service. Simfy beat Spotify to Facebook. Facebook’s behavior re: Pages brought some artists to reconsider their methods of fan interaction. Creative Commons is now on YouTube. Overall it was a great day of progress, introspection and optomism.

The Twitter photo sharing thing doesn’t suprise me, honestly. NPR did an exposé on Twitpic’s Terms and Conditions clause recently, which generated a bit of negative buzz. Even Ellen DeGeneres announced she would never TwitPic again. So naturally Twitter has seized an opportunity to play hero. More suprising is Simfy! Talk about the underdog. Nobody predicted this: German music streaming service Simfy launched their Facebook player just a week after news broke that Spotify was working on FB integration. Awesome.

So, is Facebook commandeering mid-level artists’ Pages? Some successful, non-major-label artists such as Zoe Keating noticed their Pages have been reclassified (not replaced) as “Community Pages.” The official status they previously held has now been granted to a new, Wikipedia-fed Page. While it’s not clear whether the Wiki Pages were auto-generated or made by FB staff, this mystery doesn’t stop at reclassification. When I type “Zoe Keating” into the search bar, her Page doesn’t even show up! That’s right. When I do a blanket search for her name, select “show all results” and narrow the search to Pages, it does not appear. Since it’s been a few hours, this is unlikely due to propagation delays. Weird. Unsettling.
Update: Keating’s Page was restored to “Official” status hours later, after hundreds of emails and tweets and comments had been published. Other affected artists are still struggling. Luckily this did not affect any of the Pages owned by NESS Records.

In other / better news, the creative commons license - first discovered by this artist via the European community Tribe Of Noise – has now become so mainstream that YouTube offers it as an alternative to standard copyright. YouTube announced today that it now supports Creative Commons licenses and launched a huge library of 10,000 CC videos (read the official press release here). Awesome, yes. In no way do I wish to diminish the awesomeness. However, this illustrates one HUGE way that major-label artists, major news orgs, etc. will be and have always been separated from us independants. Those 10,000 videos in the library. They are from major networks. Part of the launch, the coverage, the hype. With me? No? Look at iTunes: major artists get iTunes Exclusives and other special extras. Major artists get first crack at major breakthroughs in social media and tech. Dave Matthews had a custom Page and vanity URL before any indie artist, for example. This will forever be a hurdle that indie artists attempt to jump.

I fondly remember the days when being on iTunes was impressive. It was brand new … most people still didn’t have iPods … smartphones were only found in the hands of businessmen. Telling people your music was on iTunes gave you instant street cred and often times, before you could finish uttering the sentence, you’d converted strangers into fans. Now, everyone and their brother has their music on iTunes. Who knows if an opportunity like that will present itself again?

… now, who doesn’t wanna watch Bill Cosby playing piano on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno?!? http://bit.ly/cosbyonleno

Tags: Bill Cosby, Creative Commons, facebook, itunes, Jay Leno, piano, player, Simfy, Spotify, streaming, The Grooves, The Tonight Show, tribe of noise, twitter, video, YouTube, Zoe Keating
Posted in Press | No Comments »

Word Wars II: Words With Friends

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

If you follow my Twitter, you may have noticed that I began playing a new game in April. Words With Friends – essentially Scrabble with slight alterations (probably just enough to avoid a lawsuit) – has become my favorite iPhone game. I’m not addicted, but I do average ten simultaneous games. Avoiding insanity is easy: one major difference from the boarded version of our childhood is that after you move, you close the app and essentially walk away. Instead of waiting five boring minutes for your sister to place her word, you can proceed with real-life activities while she delibarates. Push notifications announcing her moves, and when a convenient time presents itself (grocery store checkout, bathroom, etc.) place your next word. Days may pass between moves, but the app neatly keeps track of the games for you … this is the genius of iPhone, isn’t it? The only real question here is that age-old nag, “Why didn’t I think of this?”
Most of the other modifications lend themselves to inflated scoring: some key letters have increased value; bonus squares are in different locations; I’m sure this factors into my enjoyment.
Up for a challenge? Warning: I’ve won over 90% of my games and have experienced point spreads so great (+150) that my opponents forfeited! If you don’t plan on throwing in the proverbial towel, my username is NickGrooves. See you in cyberland

~ read part one of Word Wars here ~

Tags: Board game, deux, game, iPhone, Newtoy, Scrabble, twitter, Video Games, wars, word, Word Wars, WWII, Zynga
Posted in Tangents | No Comments »

Choose Our Setlist for Shure

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

That’s right kids, we wanna know which song is your fave. We have five planned already but need a sixth, and it’s gonna be your Fan Favorite. Plus, we’re letting you decide the order! We’ll have 30 minutes to wow the judges at Nashville’s Wildhorse Saloon (this Tuesday, January 25^th) and want to open with the song that got us this far – “Foolin’ Yourself.” The rest is up to you! Leave a reply, tweet, Facebook post – whichever platform you fancy most. Click on a song title to stream it free via Bandcamp:

- Foolin’ Yourself

- Collusion Collision

- Daphne

- Tripping

- Steal Me

- Fan Favorite

What will the order be?!? Check back in a couple days to find out plus discover which song was chosen for slot #6 ~Nick, Aaron, Andy, Bryan, Bill and Tim a.k.a. Nick and The Grooves

PS: Thanks to Live Fix for being interested and inspiring creativity

Tags: Bandcamp, facebook, giveitvoice, hevenstone, Nashville Tennessee, Shure, sm58, twitter, Wildhorse Saloon
Posted in Tour Diary | 2 Comments »

How To Please Me

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

Wanna make my day? Send me emails like this one from Twitter, which I received - and confirmed true - last night: satch tweet email

Tags: follow, guitar, joe, Online Communities, satch, satriani, Social media, Social Networking, Technology, Trending and Popularity, twitter
Posted in Tangents | No Comments »

New Mobile Mirror

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Happy to announce that we’ve installed some new fancy WordPress plugins here at http://www.nickedelstein.com, and one of ‘em is a mobile mirror site! What does that mean? Well, from now on when you visit us from your mobile device – Blackberry, iPhone, Google phone, Palm, etc. – you’ll get to enjoy a clean site designed just for you! No more blue Lego cubes, Adobe Flash problems, Java jumbles … okay I don’t know a whole lot of tech talk but I do know it’s cool! Next time you whip out that PDA, connect to some free WiFi and check out NICK EDELSTEIN mobile!