Well, since all my friends did it, I finally jumped off the bridge and started using Twitter. Still not entirely sure what the real point is. Seems it has some good intentions – 0-day news, updates, notifications, etc. But mainly it seems a way of finding out when complete strangers are stuck in traffic, taking a piss, or going to bed. That said, if you’d like to find out when I’m stuck in traffic, taking a piss, or going to bed, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Of course every time I try some new web app, I have to play around with the api. Inspired by a talk by Matthew Ogle of Last.FM at the Dublin Future of Web Applications conference (which I won a free ticket to, incidentally – Woohoo!), I decided to tie in Last.FM to Twitter and so Warbler was born (get it? music, tweeting, songbird, warbler… whatever). Warbler is an AIR application that will display the last 10 recent tracks posted to your Last.FM account and let you “tweet” them with the click of button, thereby sharing your wonderful taste in music with the whole (Twitter) world.
Below are a couple screenshots to get a better idea of what I’m on about:
While functional, Warbler is in a very early alpha/testing phase. Whether it winds up more fully developed or not really depends on the amount of feedback I receive. If you try this out and think you might consider continuing to use it, let me know and give me some ideas about what additional features you’d like to see included. Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing it added as plugin to Destroy Twitter or some other Twitter client (my wife’s idea), but that’s a whole ‘nother story…
Download the zipped .air file here and start tweeting your music. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Warbler has been updated to 1.0 status with new design and pretty much all the features suggested in the comments on this page. See some details and download the newest version here. If you’ve already installed the earlier version, it will need to be uninstalled before installing the latest. That bit of inconvenience won’t be necessary going forward.
I’m using it and I like it. You got a fan of Warbler here.
Hot damn! And you’re like the little mikey of web tech.. Thanks for checking it out, Todd..
I’m using it too and first impressions are that it is really useful.
Suggestion:
- how about a setting to allow automatic tweeting of all songs the same way Last.fm does with iTunes?
Great idea.
Thanks!
I have to admit not seeing much use for this implementation. I see this works a bit differently, but if I want to communicate a particular song I am listening, I just mar it as loved and then this information is available as a feed to use stright into facebook and in twitter via twitterfeed.com (see http://blazingminds.co.uk/2009/01/22/my-experiment-with-twitter-twitterfeed-lastfm/ for more info).
Though there are some advantages in your solution: twitter password is not given to any third party and easier access to the songs afterward.
Great work Devon. Im using it and really liking what I see.
Have you tried Last.fm Love : http://lastfmlovetweet.com/ ?
@Yano, I considered that, but didn’t want to allow a bunch of twitter spam or to let people use up all their tweets with music. This way you only tweet songs that particularly interest you rather than a whole cd or ipod full of music. It may be something I consider as a user option in a future release, though.
I also don’t like having to mark songs as loved (or storing passwords as plain text in 3rd party db’s) which is why I didn’t really like the solutions posted by Edgars or Ranma. When it comes down to it though, I made this because it’s what I like to do. I don’t actually use last.fm or twitter all that much. I do appreciate the feedback and people taking the time to check it out, however.
iPhone app, maybe? :-)
@Edgars and Ranma: Although YOU may not find any particular usage for this app. I do and maybe others will/do as well. Just because it doesn’t suit your tastes doesn’t mean that someone like myself doesn’t find the app to be just what they were looking for.
Straight-forward and to the point. Plus my Twitter password doesn’t get stored on someone else’s database like the LastFMLove app does. No one gets my passwords.
“but didn’t want to allow a bunch of twitter spam or to let people use up all their tweets with music. This way you only tweet songs that particularly interest you rather than a whole cd or ipod full of music.”
PERFECT. I don’t like using up all my tweets on those very points right there.
Once again Devon, damn good job and don’t let the haters sway you from putting out the app YOU are comfortable with.
Oooo, the warbler! Give “#lastfm #love” a run for it’s money by prefacing your tweets with “#warbler”
Hey,
Loving Warbler. It’s not currently updating my tracks (it’s displaying tracks from Jan and 1 random one I listened to today). Also would like if it would have an auto update option for tracks I loved or banned.
Great app – exactly what I was looking for.
A couple of things I would like to see:
- minimise to tray option
- honor trailing whitespace in tweet preface configuration – currently strips whitespace so I get: “Listening to:blah”, rather than “Listening to: blah” (space between colon and song name).
- more formatting options for tweet text – eg replacements like: “Listening to %s on last.fm”, rather than just a prefix
Thanks and keep up the great work.
Works great and this is much better then putting all the played tracks on twitter, thanks!
Thanks for the comments all. Gonna start on a new release this week integrating most of what’s been posted here.
I have a few problems / suggestions. First, my list of played tracks doesn’t update all the time. I have to restart it to see the most recent plays. And I would like the application to stay ‘logged in’ in stead of having to log in every time I start it up. Having to do that, the preface keeps cutting off the trailing space.
Works really well otherwise. :)
Thanks for the suggestions Greg. Currently, it *should* update your last.fm tracks every 5 minutes. “Should” being the operative word. That’s something that will eventually be a user setting though. One more thing to add to the update list. Thanks again.
nice article. I am downloading Warbler , see on my tweets :)
regards
ozgur
I love what you have done here. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing I was looking for.
[...] It’s called warbler. [...]
Finally! A proper last.fm/twitter app. You’re awesome!
Finally. I Last.FM/Twitter Mashup that functions. Nice work! Thanks.
This is amazing! It lets me publish songs to twitter, but not enough to be annoying to everyone else, like if it were to update every 3 minutes on every song I listen too, that would suck for my followers.
An improvement that would be great is to make it run in the background of osx as much as possible. Like, make it as simple as possible, only having it in the menu bar and have a drop down menu or something. Like 1 click and bam, you’re twitter is updated even without opening a new window.
Maybe you can make an iphone app too! That would be neat. Can there also be customizable themes, the brown might not suit everybody, but that should come last lol.
All in all, a great application!!
Thanks for the feedback, mtl_zack. Making a mini version is definitely an idea to look at, and I’ve also been considering offering different skins or making it completely customizable in appearance. An auto tweet feature is also something I’m considering (I know you said it’s good that it didn’t do that, but a few folks have asked about it).
In any case, I appreciate the comments.
Great little Air App. Using and Tweeting its glory!
Great app! Using it now and it’s perfect, thanks! :)
great app ! But it would really be nice if it would auto post to twitter.
nice, i’ve been looking for this :)
can we change the url into (my own) bit.ly account? if we can, how can we do it, can u help:)
Just DL’d this– login seems to stall or fail; I can’t get past login. But I love the idea of it! Will re-install (OSX) and hope for the best.
@Sarah: I’m having the same problem to. I’ve used it before, then one day all of a sudden I couldn’t get past the login.
It would be great if someone has a solution I really enjoy this program.
I apologize for the difficulties. When I get some free time, I’m looking at building this app ground up in AIR 2.0 (perhaps not ’til Flash CS5 is released, but it’s coming)..
I don’t know how this ISN’T in Tweetdeck or something. Damn. this is perfect.
Thanks man!
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