Billy Chasen at f8 Conference

Facebook’s developer conference, f8, takes place today, and Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen will be speaking as part of the Mobile + Social panel.  You can watch a live stream of the conference on Facebook.  The big buzz around this conference has been Facebook’s entry into live music streaming and social listening, two features which are the bread and butter of Turntable.fm.  Evolver.fm has a good preview of the new music service.  The keynote starts at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific, and Billy’s panel is set to start sometime after 3:30pm Eastern/12:30pm Pacific.

Recap of Seth’s Interview @ the Paley Center

Greetings, fellow avatars.  I’m excited to start contributing at Turntable.fm Fans and sharing news and some thoughts on what has quickly become my favorite destination on the web.

For those of you who missed it, Turntable.fm founder Seth Goldstein was just interviewed at the Paley Center for Media in New York.  The full interview can be found here, but here are a few quick thoughts on where Turntable.fm is headed, based on what I heard:

Focus on Intimacy: We heard the word “intimacy” a few times tonight, but it wasn’t a reference to the Marvin Gaye playing in the background.  Instead, it was Seth’s way of describing what’s unique to Turntable.fm, which, as he put it, recreates the experience of sharing music with friends in your living room.  Seth also repeatedly talked about the importance of the chat function in creating this intimacy.  So you can expect that any changes to the look and feel of TT.fm will only enhance (or at least not detract from) the chat feature.  And the emphasis on intimacy also means that the 200 person cap on rooms is unlikely to change.  In fact, Seth said that the TT.fm team had been in discussions with major artists about appearing on TT.fm, and that raising the room limit for those appearances was “non-negotiable.”

Integration with Other Music Services: With the expected announcement of the Facebook music platform tomorrow during Facebook’s f8 conference, another major player is joining a suddenly crowded online music industry.  But I don’t get the sense that the TT.fm team is worried.  In fact, in this and other interviews, Seth has talked about how Turntable.fm is not substitutional but in fact complimentary to these other services.  We all know that Spotify, iTunes and other services are already integrated into the site, and I think we can expect the future to bring some very interesting combinations of our favorite music services.  [For an interesting discussion between Robert Scoble and Seth about the potential for iCloud to integrate with Turntable.fm or other sites like it, check out this recent episode of the Gillmor Gang (at the 1:01 mark).]

Get Ready for Virtual Goods: It seems pretty likely that we’ll see virtual goods sold on Turntable.fm within the next 6-12 months (think avatars, dancing abilities or even custom room decor).  But I think the TT.fm team will be very careful with how they roll this out.  Seth spoke of the need for monetization to enhance rather than detract from the user experience (and this is something that Fred Wilson, a VC investor who just joined the TT.fm board, regularly preaches). So don’t expect to be able to buy a Daft Punk avatar any time soon.  Avatars for sale don’t add much value to the user experience, and in fact could detract from the experience of DJ Wooooo and other super DJs who have worked hard for their robot helmets. Instead, I think Seth, Billy Chasen and the rest of the team will get creative, with virtual goods specifically designed to increase social interaction and engagement.  One example of this might be, similar to “bottle service” in real life, you could imagine a group of people each paying to have access to a “couch area”, with perks like a private chat window among themselves (in addition to the main chat box) or virtual drinks that you could gift to other members in the room.

Of course, all of this is just my own speculation, but with Turntable.fm evolving at breakneck speed, don’t be surprised if some of these features pop up sooner rather than later.

 

Welcome New Blogger Jason Semine, a.k.a Sheriff H.S.

Now we are three. Turntable.fm Fans welcomes new blogger Jason Semine, a.k.a Sheriff H.S., who will be posting on various news, tips, articles, whatever catches his eye and relates to the world of turntable.fm.

Fall College Tour for Turntable.fm

Just hearing via the fora.tv live stream event that there are plans for a fall college campus tour, with turntable.fm provide opening act entertainment. More details as we learn them…

Whoa! New Turntable.fm Interface!

UPDATE: Nice new feature – “DJ’s Needed” allows you to see which rooms have open DJ slots. Very useful!

It does seem like the site is getting slammed right now, though. Hard to get a page to load.

 

Turntable.fm Extension: Turntable Themes

Another quite cool extension for Chrome. Custom themes that run locally and provide kewl backgrounds and custom color schemes. Haven’t tried it, yet, but am anxious to do so tonight.

Link [via Chrome Store]: Turntable Themes

Live, Streaming Event Tonight w/ Co-Founders and DJ Wooooo

Tonight, at 7pm EST, The Paley Center For Media presents, “GENERATOR: Turntable.fm Discussion and Demonstration” featuring a talk with Turntable.fm co-founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen. DJ Wooooo will also be there, giving a demonstration of Turntable.fm. This event is being live streamed on FORA.tv.

Link: GENERATOR: Turntable.fm Discussion and Demonstration

Welcome New Blogger, Ali!

Turntable.fm Fans now has a second blogger to help ensure relevant, meaningful information about Turntable.fm makes it to you as quickly as possible. Ali from LiveTurntable.fm will soon be posting on this blog and I encourage everyone to check out (if you haven’t already) his awesome site for real-life TT events. You can also follow LiveTurntable.fm on Twitter.

Help Wanted

That’s right, I’m putting up the Help Wanted sign. Anyone out there with a free 15 mins a day who can help maintain the turntable.fm fans blog? It helps if you have familiarity with WordPress. Let me know in the comments or send me a Tweet at @turntableFmFans

Update from Turntable.fm Concerning Recent Bugs

This post from the official turntable.fm blog is so honest and relevant right now that I’m going to link to it as well as quote the entire post (so anyone reading this blog sees what tt.fm has to say). It is frustratingly difficult to manage a system with an unexpectedly large user base with a tiny team, so, while they may not be meeting everyone’s expectations, I’m glad they are making time to give updates like this.

One suggestion I’d give to tt.fm would be to hire/grab an ‘intern’ to do nothing but be the media voice of the company – someone that can listen in on some of the meetings/conversations, understand the gist of a situation, then relate a message back to the core team and ask for their approval to broadcast that message out to the user base/investors/media/whichever audience is appropriate.

Now, here is the latest turntable.fm post:

Many users have been complaining about the level of bugginess on the site recently, so we thought we would take a minute to let you all know what’s going on and were we are in solving the problem.

The top problems reported include: DJs are being disconnected, trouble uploading songs, chat lag, and freezing. Alone any of these bugs would be annoying, but in combination they can be pretty rough! At first it looked like these problems were primarily due to a new server we put in to deal with the increase in traffic that we were expecting to get with the iPhone app launch and opening up the site more. We fixed those issues and moved on. Now it seems that there are several other problems contributing to the current state of things as well; the upshot is that there is an issue with web socket connections, which is disrupting the flow of information from our servers to your browser. We admit that part of this is caused by the increase in traffic that we have been getting, while we were prepared for a realistic up-tick in users on turntable, the reality has been much greater.

I can promise you that we are doing everything that we can to get things fixed; no one wants to get knocked off the stage while they are playing their favorite tunes, including us! We are making some changes that should increase the number of successful song uploads and decrease the amount of work the upload server has to do. In addition, we have reduced the number of web sockets we need to minimize the bug inducing effects of high traffic. Please continue to send in bug reports and feedback. Our user’s opinions are invaluable at all times, but they are even more useful when things are going wrong. We are particularly interested in knowing if the knowing if the chat lag occurs for all the users in the room at the same time, so if you notice that happening, or not happening, let us know! You can send all feedback to help (at) turntable.fm.

We appreciate your continuing patience so much as we work though these growing pains. While we resolve these bugs the turntable team members who are not bug hunters will continue to work on and roll out new features on the site so that every aspect of turntable can become as awesome as possible.

Thank you.

Jess

Link [via official turntable.fm blog]: An Update