Rockin’ Robin

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Introducing Rockin’ Robin, a mashup between Last.fm and Twitter.  Head over to http://robin.rapaul.com/ to check it out if you haven’t already.

The basic premise is that you enter your Last.fm username, Rockin’ Robin fetches your recently scrobbled tracks, then mashes them up with the latest tweets from Twitter. It’s an excellent way to see what the Twitter community thinks of your tracks and to find Twitter users who have similar musical tastes. Of course you don’t need to enter your own username, you can enter the username of any Last.fm user to mashup their latest tracks.

Below is a screenshot (click to enlarge) highlighting some of the mashup goodness. Electric Feel by MGMT is the recently played track, with tweets shown from different Twitter users. To view more details on the artist, track or Twitter user you can click through to Last.fm or Twitter using the links (orange text).

Rockin’ Robin is in its early stages of development, as such there are many things that should/could be done to make Rockin’ Robin more rockin’.

Some ideas include:

  • Allow Twitter users to add there own tweets to the conversation from within Rockin’ Robin.
  • Show more tweets for popular tracks.
  • Tweak the Twitter API search to favour real user comments over radio station type tweets.
  • Show shortcut links to your Last.fm friends to make mashing up their recent tracks a simple click away.

If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to add them below.

Also stay tuned for a follow up post “The making of Rockin’ Robin” which will cover the technical side including: Accessing Twitter & Last.fm APIs, JSONP and Dojo Toolkit (query, behavior, script.io).

Tags: , , , , , ,

6 Comments to Rockin’ Robin

charles
November 14, 2008

Excellent work Richard! Although most of my scrobbled tracks return boring tweets. Some of the comments were quite interesting. It is nice to know that your music taste is not as bad as you think it is. Keep up the good work!

charles
November 14, 2008

How come the latest scrobbled tracks were not picked up by the Rockin’ Robin? Is it because it is caching them?

Richard Paul
November 14, 2008

I think the last.fm results are cached if the same request is done often in a shortish period of time. I don’t know the details though.

Hugh
November 15, 2008

This is cool! I will be waiting for the “making of” because I’m pretty much a newbie with web dev and this stuff is amazing.

Richard Paul
December 11, 2008

Just added booking marking support. So now when you enter your username you get a unique URL to bookmark and send to friends.

e.g. http://robin.rapaul.com/#GexNZ

The making of Rockin’ Robin | RAPaul.com
December 22, 2008

[...] last.fm and twitter.  If you missed my introduction to Rockin’ Robin, you can read the post here. Or you can try it out @ [...]

Leave a comment

Search

Subscribe

What I'm Doing...