Trending on Twitter – David Bowie! (1/08/2013)

This morning Twitter is all a-flurry over the new album release by David Bowie. What makes it a newsworthy story? He hasn’t released an album in ten years; the first single is iTunes only, which indicates Bowie is digitally astute; there’s a digital stream of the song available, so people are excited to share news that leads to instant gratification; lastly, this is the kind of news that wins you cool-kid points for knowing before any one else, which makes it all the more reason to retweet and share.

Top tweets:

Disclaimer: I still haven’t listened to the song. Did you? Is it any good?
Update: I’m listening to the single now. It’s really refreshing to hear that he didn’t change his sound dramatically to adapt to the modern world. This is unadulterated Bowie.

Music Trends of My Friends (1/07/2013)
Posted in Social Aggregation

I’ve been playing around with the Facebook API, using it to read open graph data from my friends. I built a quick prototype that scans for music.listens and aggregates the top songs among your friends. Here’s some top music in my network that I discovered using the app. Thanks everyone for choosing to share your listening data!

#1 – Thinkin About You by Frank Ocean. Listened to by 8 friends:

 

#2 – Gold on the Ceiling by The Black Keys. Listened to by 5 friends:

 

#3 – Shake it Out by Florence + The Machine. Listened to 39 times by 3 friends:

 

#4 – The Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov. Listened to 17 times by 1 friend (you know who you are!!!):

 

#5 – The Falling Snow by Damien Jurado. Listened to 16 times by 1 friend (and thankfully so. I love this song.)

Top Trending Tweets – Humor and One Liners (1/07/2013)

Today is monday of the first full week back to work.  Most people are probably dragging ass today, reluctant to return to their jobs and probably still adjusting to wake up at a normal hour.  What we all need is a kick in the pants, or maybe a little inspiration.  This is evident from the trending tweets in my automaton app this morning.  People seem to be ignoring politics, news, and current events in favor of great one-liners and generally amusing, uplifting content.

Here are some of my favorite examples: