My friend threw together an app that scrapes your MySpace contacts and puts useful info into a reusable format.
DOWNLOAD IT HERE. (ZIP FILE)
UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.
Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:
“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel
There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.
If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.
Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.
[viddler id=10cc3285&h=370&w=437]
This looks cool. Thanks, Arin for the heads up.
I wish it wasn’t necessary for developer to build their own APIs for these social sites like myspace. I wish there was just a comprehensive API to begin with.
I’m worried that new innovations in music discovery might not be able to play ASCAP music because of the cost. I heard that this might be the case for small internet radio stations… I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this.
Then, I did come across these ASCAP contracts for new media channels… it’s about $1000/year minimum. This sounds high to me at first for a totally underground, out-of-my-bedroom type of channel, but then I got to thinking… A fast, enterprise-speed server, which is what I think you’d want if you were going to do something like an internet radio station, will probably cost you $100/month… So basically, if you were doing that and you wanted to play ASCAP music (and not get your pants sued off) you’d be doubling that amount… say $200-$300/month…
Then
I found a cool internet radio station called erika.net (that does play ASCAP and BMI music) and it turns out I wasn’t too far off. They say on their site that it costs about $400/month to keep their service going.
to be continued…
Part One – Some Background. Long Tail, Net Neutrality & Free Culture
First, let me apologize for how long this damn thing is. Unfortunately, I need to make sure I get everyone on the same page more or less as far as what I see as the important ideas/themes to consider when looking at the current condition of Music (and all other Media). If the set-up is old news to you, bare with me while I school everyone else for a second.
Second, if you’re interested in what is going on with all this stuff, you really ought to check out the book: The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution by Dave Kusek. The first six chapters are available as a podcast in the iTunes Store HERE (iTunes URL Link). And a variety of links to where you can purchase the entire Audiobook can be found HERE.
This is where I got the idea of “Music Like Water.” In the first chapter of the book, Kusek talks about how in the future, music will flow like water without the constant interruptions we experience now when we have to buy or download it or move it from one drive to another. Music will just be there waiting. Like water through a faucet, it will pour. It will be as abundant and as varied as we like. I believe, as long as the Net remains neutral, this is inevitable.
Right now of course, that’s not at all how it works. But if you’ve got your ear to the tracks you can hear it coming. Digital Media, The Web, Search, Recommendation Systems, Social Software, RSS/Atom feeds, P2P technology, increasing connection speeds, accelerating processing power, the cheapening of storage – We are clearly on the threshold of a paradigm change. This is a particular moment in time when some very exciting things are happening with regard to how media is curated, discovered and distributed, not to mention how it’s created.
This stuff is much bigger than just music too. Of course all of these concepts carry over into Film, News, Literature, instructional products, the list goes on, but even beyond all that, this is a profound moment in history because the very process by which Human Culture grows, changes and spreads is changing because of the Internet and the invention of digital product. Anyone with access to blue-collar amounts of money can create media. Since increasingly anyone can participate in the cultural dialog, people are. This phenomenon is causing the few companies and institutions that have had most of the control over Culture in its many forms for all of living memory to lose market share as they increasingly find themselves in competition with Everyone and Everything else.
The “Everything Else” is also called the Long Tail and is examined by Chris Anderson in his book, “The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This is a good book to read or listen to because it brings to light an important fact: There is more value in the sum of all the less-popular and niche products than there is in just the “Top Hits” we’ve grown up with.
The “Everyone Else” is me and you. What we are participating in here is what Lawrence Lessig calls the Read/Write Web. Rather than a one-way, or Read-Only form of media, digital media and the Web are very conducive to dialog. One example of this dialog is sampling in music. Another is the blogosphere. And there are many, many more. The Hands-On, Read/Write, Two-Way “remix-culture” that we are finding ourselves in suddenly makes you and me part of the “Everything Else” I mentioned a moment ago.
In this way, we are taking market share from corporate media and so corporate media is losing influence over our Culture and losing Money as the value they can offer advertisers is falling. And guess what. They want to stop it. That’s exactly what the Net Neutrality debate is about. If the Net becomes un-neutral, it will be like handing the freedom to participate that we now enjoy over to companies that stand to gain from preventing our participation in Media, and our access to a variety of media products.
If you want to learn more about Two-Way Media and how Corporate Media is trying to control it, go read or listen to Lawrence Lessig’s book: “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture.” It’s free!
Almost everyone I know uses illegal means to access media products at leas some of the time. Often it’s just too inconvenient to get media the legal way. Actually it’s often not even an option.
The traditional purveyers of Culture are losing money because of this. Media have been selling eyes and ears to the advertisers that fund them since before your parents were born. It’s not paranoid conspiracy-theory-speak when I say that the corporate media want to maintain control over the Culture Markets.
MORE ON THIS TO COME. In the meantime, check these out:
Trent Reznor Talks to CNET About Saul Williams Release
NIN Releases Ghosts Volume I for FREE
For more info, visit From Here To Awesome
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHUwTkbAvn4&rel=1]
Is there a way to download MySpace Friends? Not officially.I used “O-Community” to scrape my friends out of myspace and I used TextWrangler to turn the file into a series of <a> tags within <li> tags that include the XFN rel=”friend” attribute. I will be looking into how I might publish this information in a more relevant structure/format, probably as SIOC or FOAF data, if I can figure out how to do that.
I wish FaceBook & MySpace allowed you to download a spreadsheet (excel or whatever) of all your contacts and their demographic information like Age, Gender, Location Etc. Some other formats I would like to be able to download my contacts in are RDF/XML, vCard, CSV Etc…
Actually, it is explicitly against MySpace’s and FaceBook’s Terms Of Service to do what I have done here. Scripts and Bots are prohibited. Perhaps this will change some bright beautiful day in the future.
We need to be able to mine the ‘Data of Our Lives,’ including of course the contacts we make through Social Software services. We also need to be able to Back-Up all our Data.
If you would like help scraping your MySpace friends, drop me a line and maybe I can help out.
I hate how our Congress slips irrelevant terms into legislation all the time. “College Affordability? What do Piracy, P2P and File-Sharing have to do with the affordability of ‘Higher Education?’
From CNET (I really like CNET lately):
“The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a higher-education funding bill that includes controversial new antipiracy obligations for universities.
The 354-58 vote to approve the College Opportunity and Affordability Act leaves intact an entertainment industry-backed provision, which makes up just a tiny part of a bill that has ballooned to more than 800 pages.
It says higher-education institutions participating in federal financial aid programs “shall” devise plans for “alternative” offerings to unlawful downloading–such as subscription-based services–or “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”
Bollocks.
If you look at the Yeas and Nays, you’ll see that the majority Yea votes were Democrats. Actually, the only Nays were Republicans! This is a good example of the Democratic party falling inline with Anti-Freedom, Pro-Corporate interests. I’m saying this only because many of my friends are self-proclaimed Left-Wingers and it is often assumed that the Left is more Pro-Freedom. Not so fast.
From the Public Knowledge Blog
Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA speaking at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee‘s State of the Net Conference
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxYGZ7Z6joQ&rel=1]
I want to find the full length version of this. UPDATE: The entire video is available HERE. (Unfortunately it’s a RealPlayer File, and it doesn’t play back properly through my MOTU 828… The fix for this is to switch to built-in speakers. Lame. Through my 828 the sound is all garbled and slowed down and only comes out through one channel.)
There’s also a complete Mp3 download HERE.
I heard part of the panel thru an audio stream that stopped about ten minutes in. For this reason I can say at least that the jump-cuts in this youtube video aren’t edits to bend the meaning of what Cary Sherman is saying. They’re just speeding it up. I’m looking around for the full video. I can tell from what I heard that this is an enlightening panel with a nice selection of speakers on it.
Panel:
In case you missed it and you probably did if you’re the type of folk that will read this, I wanted to steer you toward the last episode of the PRI show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge.
Their Podcast is broken down by segment and can be found here (itunes store url).
Part one, is about apocalyptic settings in fiction… I really thought the last part was interesting. An author named Jonathan Lethem Scott Westerfeld wrote a novel, apparently for teens, about a scenario in the future where Social Currency via the Web is everything (or something to that effect) – a sort of Social Software Hell. The interview touches on some ideas about privacy and technology and also why Teens may relate so well to dystopian settings. All very interesting to me.
The other segment is about plagiarism and there is various anecdotal fuel for discussion there too.
It’s amusing to me that I would find it strange that both of these topics, Intellectual Property and Privacy, be touched on by a radio program in the context of being completely unrelated. I’m so used to thinking about these two topics as parts of the big can of worms that is the Digital Age we’re just starting to come to grips with.
The Pirate Bay is an infamous (or just fairly reliable) BitTorrent Tracker that has previously been completely out of range from legal action by the RIAA and others because they are in Sweden where the law apparently doesn’t consider BitTorrent illegal.
The site actually even throws a giant bird at all the lawyers that send them cease and desist letters and other threats, often responding with childish obscenities. And they post it all on their site HERE. Pretty audacious (and funny).
According to TechCrunch, according the The Wall Street Jounal,
Based on evidence collected in a 2006 raid on the offices of The Pirate Bay, Swedish prosecutors say that by the end of January they expect to charge the individuals who operate the file-sharing service with conspiracy to breach copyrights.
The Pirate Bay’s operators say they are expecting the charges and will prepare their defense with the aid of government-funded lawyers for a trial later this year. “We’re not worried,” says Fredrik Neij, a Pirate Bay co-founder. “We think the law is on our side.”
The Pirate Bay’s operators say they have been followed in recent weeks by camera-toting private detectives in foreign-registered cars. In September, they filed a police complaint claiming that MediaDefender, a U.S. counterpiracy company, had been hired by several Hollywood studios and music companies to hack into their site and shut it down.
MediaDefender, which itself was hacked by a shadowy group last year, denies the accusation. “We’re a reputable public company,” says Chief Executive Randy Saaf. “We’re not going to be doing hacking. That’s silly.”
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