TWITTER is cool, but if you like listening to music while you surf and micro-blog, you might want to check out Blip.
I previously blogged about Blip, which allows you to let people know what you’re listening to and share the music with them by embedding an MP3 in your Blip update.
In an e-mail interview, I talked to Jeff Yasuda, CEO of Fuzz.com, the company behind Blip.
Fuzz was born of the founders’ passion for music, and is intended to be an online community where music lovers can easily interact with musicians and other music lovers.
“The concept of Fuzz really began with a bunch of guys who were tech, legal, and finance geeks by day with dreams of being bona fide musicians by night,” Jeff said in his e-mail. “The latter never really happened, but we thought we would come up with a way to blend technology and our start-up experience with our passion for music and the artists who create it. Many of us still play in bands and we hoped that we could build a way to help artists manage their music careers as a business.”
According to Jeff, the company decided to come up with the Blip service as part of its overall strategy for attracting music fans and giving music artists on Fuzz a new way to reach out to their audience.
“It actually works pretty well with our current user base of independent music fans — many of whom have their own followings as music tastemakers. The obvious reason we needed to build this from scratch was that Twitter, Pownce, [and] the other micro-blogging sites [did not have] music capabilities.”
By the way, if, like me, you’re wondering why they named the company and service Fuzz and Blip, Jeff replied: “Fuzz happened to be the name of one of my bands. I liked the name. One of our engineers, Ian White, came up with the name Blip… it’s quick to do and shows up instantly — sort of like a ‘blip on the music radar.’”
Micro-blogging has become popular and has received a lot of mainstream media attention, particularly in the wake of the unbelievable tragedy that was the earthquake in China. If you’re someone, however, who hasn’t joined the Twitter bandwagon yet or doesn’t see the point of micro-blogging, you might be wondering what attraction this Web 2.0 service holds for people. Jeff, however, says micro-blogging has become popular because of spontaneity and convenience.
“I think there’s a certain spontaneity that has made the ‘at-the-moment’ aspects of short posts entertaining. It’s also less intimidating for first-time ‘bloggers’ since it’s easier to get your ideas out quickly — no need for a long blog post (and associated editing). If you missed that moment, oh well. But, if you’re plugged in at the time, it’s a pretty fun way to keep track of what’s going on at that particular moment.
“Twitter really took off at SXSW (a big music festival in Austin, Texas) when fans were able to tweet to all of their followers about specific shows they were going to or update others about last-minute shows. It spread like wildfire. No more one-to-one texting required… Simply put, micro-blogging is fun.”
While micro-blogging may be fun, what’s Blip’s competitive advantage over other micro-blogging tools? Does is it have other advantages apart from the ability to share MP3s?
“Besides being the first micro-blogging site with dynamic updates so you never need to refresh the page, the guys have built some pretty cool features into the existing product. We offer a way to integrate with other networks such as Friendfeed, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Jaiku.
“We also provide buy links to Amazon or our own store at Fuzz if artists have marked their songs for sale. It’s a great way to discover music because the recommendations come from people you trust… We can’t tell you about the new features that are on the way, but let’s just say stay tuned,” Jeff said.
One of the things about Twitter is that it’s become a victim of its own success, suffering downtime due to the sheer popularity of the service and what Twitter has admitted is a mistake in its architecture.
Given this, I asked Jeff what he and his company have learned from Twitter’s experience to avoid similar downtimes if Blip becomes really popular.
“We all use Twitter and we like it a lot. Sure, Twitter gets beaten up all of the time for being down. There’s even a site called Is Twitter Down? — it’s hilarious. Without going into the technical details, we’ve learned from Twitter’s challenges and we’re trying to do our best to avoid similar issues. We’re building the architecture from the ground up to be able to withstand user growth and bandwidth challenges.”
Thanks for your time, Jeff, and we’ll just stay tuned.
