Tokudu

Music with a Soul

tokudu — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:22:39 +0000

So… I’m a big fan of various kinds of electronic music. On a daily basis I listen to a lot of genres from #trance, #drumandbass and #breaks to #dubstep, #brostep and #electro. With the rise of EDM over the past 2 years, people’s appreciation for “banging beats” has had both positive and negative effect on my music discovery. Yes, it’s often a lot easier to find decent electronic music from various random unknown 18-year-old producers from around the world, but the “really good” stuff often gets lost in the noise, which is really unfortunate.

In the recent few months, I’ve had massive appreciation for artists such as Pretty Lights that have stayed true to their soul instead of jumping on the band wagon of “let’s drop some loud bass and make some noise”. Derek’s shows still make me bang my head with the emotion of a 16 year girl at her first rave, and I often don’t resist the temptation to bust a move while listening to his “Hot Shit” podcasts in my living room. After all, his Soundcloud page says it best:

“Pretty Lights is giving the people what they want: electro organic cutting-edge party rocking beats that fill venues with energy and emotion and send dance floors into frenzies.”

Don’t get me wrong though. I still think that Skrillex is a very talented dude (I say that having been to 6 of his shows), but Pretty Lights holds a very special place in my heart. It’s music with a soul.

The Virality Experiment – My Word Cloud

tokudu — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:47:30 +0000

Virality works. It’s a fact. It’s the core business component of many modern startups. It’s their key to retention, growth and, thus, success. 15 years ago, it took Hotmail almost a year to grow to 3 million users. In the past year, startups like Kik and LiveProfile did it in weeks and days. How? The answer is simple – viriality.

For a while, I’ve thought of virality as a mythical term that douchey business guys threw around to get investors empty their pockets for a new cool Web 2.0 startup. However, as I got more interested in entrepreneurship , I started to finally understand what it means for a product to have a viral component. Nevertheless, it was still something I have never experienced myself. Yes, I’ve seen products created by friends spread on Internet faster than high school rumors, yet I have never been the one to spark the fire.

It all changed over the last few weeks. About a month ago, I was in NYC on a work trip and I was hanging out with my good friend Ian who I haven’t seen in a while. In the past, I worked with Ian on TalkMesh, and he is definitely one of my favorite people to pair-program with. Since we haven’t coded together in quite some time, we decided to take advantage of my week in NYC and hack together on a project. Given the time constraints, Ian suggested to write a Facebook app with some sort of a viral component. Ian has previously successfully launched My Friend Map – a popular Facebook app for showing your friends’ location on a map. With my interest in virality and my past experience with Facebook APIs, his idea seemed quite interesting to me and well scoped for a single week of work.

After some brainstorming we decided to create an app that would generate tag clouds based on what has been posted on your Facebook wall. We looked at the competition, and realized that most of the similar existing apps really sucked at generating good-looking compact clouds. This is bad for virality.

A viral product typically has two notable characteristics:

The “cool” factor or the “viral component”
Simple sharing channel

While the competition also leveraged Facebook for an easy sharing model, they simply failed on the “cool” side of things. Let’s face it, people love to share stuf when it looks good. And good often means beautiful. It’s as simple as that. When people look at something that blows them away from esthetic point of view, all they want to do is share it with others to validate their own excitement. That’s why in order to make a viral tag cloud app, the results needs to look stunning.

So, what does a stunning tag cloud look like?

After some more Googling around, we realized that the most beautiful clouds on the web are generated by Wordle. This tool is quite amazing. By taking advantage of a great set of fonts, well thought-through color combinations and a smart generation algorithm, it manages to output some beautiful results. Even when the tags themselves were meaningless to me, the generated clouds looked so good that I wanted to share them. That was exactly what we needed it. Add the elegance of the Wordle-type clouds to the personalized set of tags extractable from your Wall posts, and you got the “cool” factor.

With that in mind, we started hacking away. Luckily, we were able to dig up a paper by the author of Wordle that helped us get started. A week later we had an app at our hands: I’m not gonna lie – I was pretty happy with the outcome. The results were quite stunning. Here is a quick sample:

The app’s functionality was very straight-forward:

Go to apps.facebook.com/my_word_cloud/
Customize your cloud by selecting a color scheme, a font and entering a caption for the image
Generate the cloud and post it to your wall.

However, these 3 simple steps contained an important viral loop. The app added a caption to the image that included the URL to the app itself. Then, it posted the images to your wall for all your friends to see. Since the images looked really attractive, your friends would follow the link in captions to generate their own clouds. And so on..

We hoped that given the viral loop, the app would “explode” and spread like wild fire. And so it did.

Even though, we only seeded the app by asking a few close friends to try it out, two weeks later the app grew to over 200 hundred thousands users! The real growth happened over just a few days. Have a look at the graph below:

The most interested part of the growth was that the app somehow randomly exploded in Nederlands and Brazil. People there loved it:

What happened next? The app got shut down by Facebook. Apparently, we were violating some terms. They offered us an opportunity to fix things and relaunch the app. However, in my mind the project has accomplished its primary goal: it has proved me that virality is one of the primary drivers of product growth and adoption. If you are designing a product, you need to focus on the user. However, it’s often not enough. In order to succeed and succeed fast, you need a good distribution channel. Viral growth is often the solution.

Launched: Google APIs Discovery Service

tokudu — Sat, 14 May 2011 22:44:34 +0000

Well, I had yet another launch at Google. This one is as geeky as it gets – the Google APIs Discovery Service. It’s essentially an API that lists and describes other Google APIs. You can read the launch announcement on Google’s Code Blog or a few other sites such as PC World and Programmable Web.

As I mentioned in my last post, this was the service that I talked about in my Google I/O talk titled “Building Custom Client Libraries for Google APIs“. Here is the video from the session:

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this blog post are not representative of those of my employer

Come and see me at Google I/O 2011

tokudu — Sat, 07 May 2011 19:51:39 +0000

This is one of those years that you accomplish something that a few years ago you thought was not possible. For me, it’s speaking at Google I/O.

That’s right. I will be speaking at Google I/O 2011 on Wednesday this week. If you are coming to Bay Area for the event, make sure to stop by and check out my session: “Building Custom Client Libraries for Google APIs“. Here is is the snippet:

Although Google offers client libraries to access our APIs for a variety of languages, there are some languages out there that don’t yet have client library. In this session, we will demonstrate how you can easily build a client library for your favorite language using the new API Discovery service. Join us and learn how you can make it even easier to use Google APIs in your preferred programming environment.

The session will be recorded and posted on YouTube within 24 hours. I will make sure to post the video for those of you that are not attending.

Pretty-printing an associative array in PHP

tokudu — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:45:01 +0000

If you are a PHP developer, you often debug things by simply dumbing variable values to the screen using echo or print. A common solution for associative arrays and objects is another function - print_r – that prints human readable information about a variable. However, it’s still not an ideal solution since the output is not properly indented or “pretty-printed“.

Here is a quick function that will pretty-print an associate array or an object very nicely in PHP: