sameer iyengar

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Entries from December 26th, 2009

Guilty Pleasures

December 26th, 2009 by sameer
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What you don’t share is just as telling as what you do.  Check out this Last.fm mashup that shows which tracks people most often delete from their profile of scrobbles.

Most deleted scrobbles from last.fm.

Most deleted scrobbles from last.fm.

Conclusion: People don’t want to admit they like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.

Last.fm also released their Top 40 of 2009 and, more interestingly, released some raw data for people to play around with.  Analytics are fun and I’d love to see more companies make this kind of aggregate data available.

For example, it let me find this fun fact — Of the top 1000 artists on Last.fm, Lady Gaga received a whopping 3% of the 646 million playbacks.  I’m guessing that doesn’t even count the ones that people later decided to delete.

Category: analyticsNo Comments.

@popularnow: Search Trends + News + Twitter

December 6th, 2009 by sameer
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Check out @popularnow on Twitter.

Its a mashup I wrote that tries to find interesting news based on Google Search Trends. It uses Yahoo! BOSS and the Twitter API and runs on Google App Engine.

Few things I learned:

  • App Engine makes writing simple apps and rapid prototyping a breeze.
  • Yahoo’s APIs are incredibly developer-friendly.
  • Twitter spam-bots will find you even before you tell anyone about your account.

So far, it’s found some interesting articles and a whole lot of Tiger Woods gossip.   I guess that’s the sad reality of what people have been searching for over the past week.  Even cooler, it somehow got two retweets.

Follow it and let me know what you think…

Category: programmingNo Comments.