Twadio - “The Sound of Silence”

Twadio is another in my series of micro-startup web ideas with Andrew Dubber and is a cute little idea: you follow a user on Twitter (the tweejay) and every few minutes you get a music track title and artist name in your twitter stream.

Sounds simple, but the cute thing is that you will definitely already know that nearly every track that the station ‘plays’ and just from the title you should be able to get that song stuck in your head, at least until the next song plays. Hence -’silent’ radio. You can listen to Twadio in places where you can’t normally listen to music even or use it to shake that awful Spice Girls track out of your brain that you heard in the taxi - at least that’s the idea.

And if you don’t know a track or you suddenly realise you have to have it in your collection, you can get a thirty second sample of it on the site under “how does it go again?” and then buy it from Amazon on MP3 (and hopefully iTunes soon). We get a tiny percentage of any sale - that’s how it pays for itself.

So far we’ve had some great comments back from our ‘alpha testers’ (thanks all!), the best of which was “this is somewhere between genius and WTF” from spookydirt - thanks!

This was something of an experiment.

On Saturday morning at 6am (don’t ask) I sat with Dubber’s list of tunes that he had hand-picked for the task, decided to teach myself as much Python as I needed to do my first Google App Engine application and set to work. I had it all online by about 11am, and then spent a few hours that evening and Sunday morning tweaking the graphics and trying to get the domain name to work.

Seriously - that was more complicated than the whole app - registering domain names on Google and getting them to point to your Google App Engine site is feindishly complicated and requires having at least twenty tabs open in your web browser. Then, a morning of testing with our generous twitter alpha testers, and we released it at 4pm.

So a total of 34 hours start to finish, with a trip to the ever excellent Ikon Gallery all saturday afternoon, lots of playing with my toddler, doing a few bits and bobs around the house and some sleep of course. So let’s say fifteen hours work?

Anyway - just shows what you can do with freely available tools and friends who have crazy ideas.

What’s your web idea that you shelved in 2008 because it sounded too hard?