sndchck blog

sndchck by southwest

The 2011 South By Southwest festival has landed in Austin, TX and sndchck is there - well, actually none of us physically made it down this year but we’re watching your Tweets from a distance…

We’ve been working on some pretty awesome Twitter-related stuff for the festival and now we’re really excited to show it off!

1) SXSW playlists!  Stay up on what everyone’s talking about at SXSW with sndchck!  We’re processing every single tweet with the #sxsw hashtag and using that data to make awesome SXSW playlists based on what bands everyone’s talking about.  At any time during the festival you can visit http://sndchck.com/sxsw to check out the most popular bands during the last hour, during the last 24 hours and for the entire festival to date.

These playlists also have charts showing a timeline of how often each band has been mentioned on Twitter with the #sxsw hashtag.  These charts allow you to see the buzz each band has generated over time, and all the data is virtually real-time (to within ~20 seconds!).

Check out Talib Kweli spiking this morning:

2) Contribute!  Tweeting a suggestion to @sndchck??  Add the #sxsw hashtag to get your favorite band trending!

3) SXSW in your playlists.  If you’ve been listening to any bands on sndchck that are playing the festival, they’ll now have a clickable badge that will take you to the SXSW playlist page.

All these features make sndchck a great place to keep up with what’s hot in music at SXSW, whether you’re lucky enough to be in Austin this week or not.  Check out the new pages and tell us what you think!

-The sndchck team

sndchck ver 0.2

It’s been another grueling week for your humble sndchck engineers, who work 40+ hours at their real jobs and then spend their nights working to build sndchck into a great product.  Luckily we couldn’t be enjoying it more.

This morning we pushed out the latest version of sndchck, and in it we added some new features and improved the overall functionality of the site significantly.  Please check out the details below and visit sndchck again to see what’s new!

-DM support!  You can now post an artist to your sndchck playlist via Direct Message on Twitter!  Just populate a DM to @sndchck with any artist that you want to listen to.  Note that the @sndchck Twitter account needs to be following you for this new feature to work; just follow @sndchck and we’ll automatically follow you back within five minutes.

-More Twitter flexibility.  Some people were frustrated with having to tweet “artist_name @sndchck”, so we’ve added the ability to reply directly to @sndchck with an artist name.  For example:

@sndchck The Strokes

will now add The Strokes to your playlist.  (Highly recommended, btw…)

-Improved playlists.  We spent a lot of time improving both the appearance and the functionality of your playlists.  We’re providing better song selections for the artists you’re listening to, and we’re getting them to you faster.  Additionally, we’ve made it easier to visit a friend’s playlist.  If they’ve sent you an artist suggestion, you can simply click on their name in your playlist.  If not, you can still navigate to http://sndchck.com/ and add their name to the end of the URL to explore their playlist.

-Add artists right from your playlist page.  We’ve added the ability for you to add more artists to your playlist directly from the top of the page when you’re logged in.

Please stop by sndchck and check out all the new stuff we’re working on.  We’re really excited about it!

-The sndchck team

sndchck ver 0.1

This blog is where we will be posting all sndchck-related news and updates.

It’s been quite an adventure so far.  After our crazy overnight session building sndchck at Music Hack Day NYC, we all realized that we had a pretty awesome product on our hands.  In a little over 24 hours we had built all the core functionality that we needed to realize the “check out this band” app that we had set out to create.  We were further encouraged when four days later we got a write up on Mashable that got quite a bit of attention.

It’s hard to convey the amount of excitement and enthusiasm we have all experienced both over the hack day weekend and since.  Working as a team to build something that people are actually interested in is incredibly thrilling, and building something that you yourself actually use is even more so.  This enthusiasm is a major reason that without even discussing it we knew that sndchck would become a full-on side project for all of us.  I’m very happy to unveil the initial proof of that fact.  In the seven days since the event we’ve been busy working on our first set of updates and now we’ve pushed out a “0.1” version of the site.  If you’ve already been to sndchck, please visit again!  And if today will be your first visit…well maybe that’s for the best anyways…

Here’s a summary of the changes we’ve implemented over the past week:

-Better music.  We utilize information and assets from all over the web, including places like The Echo Nest, last.fm and Bandcamp.  We’ve made our requests more efficient to provide better music selection and quality.  BONUS: More sites (and more music) on the way (including SoundCloud!).

-Allowed playlist pages to be viewed by anyone.  You don’t even need to log in!  Check out what some of the sndchck team is listening to here: Keith, Jeff, Ricky and Brian.

-Made playlists easier to use.  With both interface and back end updates it’s now much easier to stream your music.

-Provided the ability to delete unwanted suggestions.  Whoops!  We had quite a few of those at the start…

-Design updates.  Does sndchck still look like an app built in 24 hours?  We hope not.  We’ve been hard at work updating our design from “Oh God, we’ve got 15 minutes left!” to “Hey, check this out!”  We hope you enjoy it.

In addition to these updates we’ve improved the functionality and efficiency of virtually every major component of the site.  All of us were sitting around yesterday using sndchck in our development environment and chomping at the bit to push out all these new changes.

Please visit sndchck today and let us know what you think!

-The sndchck team