Today we at Gigulate are very excited to announce the next major Gigulate release: Personalisation.
What does this mean?
There are a bunch of new features, all focused around making the Gigulate experience work specifically for your own music tastes.
My Dashboard
Once registered on Gigulate, this is your go-to place for music news and gigs. It’s all personalised exactly for you: stick Artist names into your own Watchlist (I’ll explain that in a bit), and Gigulate will track them for you.
Everything on the dashboard is automagically filtered to be exactly what you want. No News stories or Gig recommendations about artists you don’t care about.
Watchlist
This is the place you visit to tell us what the most important artists are in your life, so Gigulate can give you a personal experience. But don’t worry: it won’t take you long to get your watchlist full of artists that you care about. Here’s why:
- Quick Add – Stick an artist you want to hear about in the quick add box and you’re away. It’s the old fashioned way of filling up your watchlist. But if you only want to track say, 10 artists it’s perfect.
- Site Importer – Already got a profile on another music website? Then use the Gigulate Site Importer to quickly add all your artists. At the moment we offer support for: Last.fm, Myspace, iLike, Soundcloud and Pandora. We’ll be adding support for loads of other music sites soon. So check back here (on the blog) for updates.
- Music Scanner – Got a local music collection on a computer? This simple app allows you to quickly scan your mp3 or aac folders for artists and sync them with your watchlist.
Find out more
Twitter alerts
For some this is an added bonus, for others, it’s going to be really useful. We’re announcing our Twitter alerts service. It takes about 30 seconds to get it working, simply follow @GigulateAlerts and get direct messages about the artists you care about, so you can be in the know about the music news you care about as soon as it breaks. And don’t worry about the size of your watchlist, you can manage it seperately, either from Gigulate.com, or directly using commands such as ADD, REMOVE and LIST through Twitter. Find out more
We really hope you like these new features, we’ve had great fun building them.
If you spot any bugs or would like to leave feedback leave a comment on this blog post or @ me on twitter: @johnmartin
Heck! Spend five minutes reading the news this week and you’d be forgiven for thinking the world is falling apart… Big deal! Just make sure you’ve a few bob in your pocket to join us for launchy beers. Yep, Gigulate is so so very close to our first iteration (more of which at the weekend) that the three of us are starting to steam a bit – and the only thing that’ll cool us down is soggy weather and nice draught London beer. From a pub.
So what’s the plan? Erm, pass. All you have to do, is drop your email address in to Gigulate.com and we’ll email you with details of which central London pub we’ll be at on the evening of Thursday October 30th. All are welcome, though we’re operating a strict ‘Geeks Only’ policy on the door, which requires you to be particularly spoddy about something we love – Music, Tech, Robots, Monkeys, Um-bongo – the usual. To get in. Do it now, we’d probably love to see you.
Oh yeah, if you drop your details in you’ll also get into the first round of invites to Gigulate proper. Small bonus.
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Sorry this is only the second post on here so far. We’ve been quite busy. See, people have been saying nice things about Gigulate and we’re still building it.
There’s a lot of thinking going into how the clever little robot we’ve built works, it’s the pulsating heart of this here thing we’re doing and we’re pouring a great deal of our love and energy into it. The Gigulator is our guide through the world of music, ingesting all the juiciest Music News, Gig Listings, Blogs and general information at a rate you wouldn’t believe, crunching it up like crazy and spitting it out in a nice clean digested bolus, a bit like an owl. The Gigulator is employee #1.
So Duncan Amey has been sat on the top deck of a big red London bus for an hour every day with a notepad and paper, he won’t mind me telling you that technically, he’s The Gigulator’s father. Duncan is one of the brightest, brainiest, nicest chaps you’ll ever meet. He has a knack expressing something very complicated in a way that everybody can understand. That said, what he’s building with Music News, Blogs and Gig listings has stretched that a bit for me – I’ve kept up so far, just.
John Martin is our chief creative brain. I’m in no doubt that John conceives, designs, codes and pieces together whole new websites using the 80% of our brain that the rest of us haven’t yet worked out how to use. You’ll find his charming personality and razor wit sprinkled through every visual message, chart and page on Gigulate – John surprises and excites people with what is possible. That’s what he’ll shortly be doing for you.
So there’s three of us (including me), and now our little Gigulator. There’s still a ton of work to do, but we’re almost ready to show you the first bit. If you haven’t already, drop your details in at http://gigulate.com and we’ll be in touch soon. Promise.
Ben Perreau
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We’ve been sat on this for a little while, not too long. Weeks, not months. Sorry. It’s come from a few little discoveries we’ve all had working with music over the last few years: Namely, that good quality music information is hard to find, and that you’d be silly to rely on one place for all of it. In the past, I’ve often found myself listlessly sifting through various websites on the lookout for the latest, most useful information on a band I have just been listening to, or loved and missed. Of course – I eventually found it – but I’ve never been sure who was the most reliable source. Who got to the story first? Who has the best access to the information? And which site merely read the story, copied it and rewrote it?
Likewise, Music fans like us rely on music information a fair bit: to tell you when a band announces a tour, a new record, to tell each other what we think of it, or even just to find out what artists are up to. Most importantly (and this is the irritating bit) there’s nowhere to go to find out who the most talked about bands of the moment are and just find a way to see them play – we’re all agreed that it’s the only way to know if they’re any good.
Gigulate has been designed with the help of music journalists and writers to quickly solve that little conundrum. Our mighty wizards are almost done creating a machine able to find out who’s talking about bands you love, and who everybody is talking about that perhaps you don’t know. In the shortest space of time, you’ll be able to get right up to speed.
All of this information will help you decipher music without wading through endless pages, the Gigulator is designed to work out who the most authoritative sources are, and bubble up the best stories with Gigs for every band available right next to them so that you can book tickets to the most talked about bands easily. This very second, it’s sat in the corner of our tiny bedsit, sifting through the mass, and learning as it goes. Less time spent = more time for fun.
More on how it will work soon,
xx
