If there’s one thing I really like, is rapid development. This means I got pretty excited when I was going through some blogs and found this blog post from a few days ago over at the awesome Creating Passionate Users. Basically, the post talks about a talk at the Friends of O’Reilly camp by Squirrel Eiserloh on total immersion / ultra-rapid game development. Now you’ll probably scream “oh what are you talking about, Fred? Games?”.

No, this ain’t about games. This is about my favourite way of getting ideas and fast prototypes out there. About the way I love to develop software, and about the way I’ve been doing some pieces of software for the last few years. Oh, the good days of the demoscene. The 24h/48h do-nothing-else coding sessions. You know, porn for geeks with nothing better to do.

Ummm seriously now. What better way to use (and abuse) teamwork and get the most out of people than a creative jamming session of anything? Because you know, this is not just about code. So roll up your sleeves, get a place that’s good enough to code and crash at, get some friends over and actually do stuff! You’ll have fun, and if you set goals that everyone must acomplish - be that finishing a product, tackling some new features, fixing bugs, creating the next bestestest rock album -, you’ll get stuff *done*!

When I fly to San Francisco in a few days, I’ll be lining up a few of these nights, working on rolling out something cool for O’Reillys Web 2.0 Conference (oh soon, soon). But apart from that, make sure you let me know if there’s any other hackathons going on for web 2.0 people in SF/Palo Alto, because it’s a great way to get acquainted with everyone else in the area. I was always jealous of the cool stuff like Tag Tuesdays and the Super Happy Devhouse (photos by the guys at Laughing Squid), so since I’m coming to town, I might as well have some code-fun.

People who are into this sort of stuff may also like Dorkbot and similar organizations. Me, oh, I love them. Get cracking.

Notes: Oh, and if you need more links for inspiration, here’s the notes from Six Aparts hackathon, Feedburner, and from the guys at Jotspot. Startups can have fun too. In fact, start-ups deserve all the fun, because once you go corp, there’s no code + drinks sessions with the board.

So part of the blogosphere is raving about Pandora. I guess I always get the “so what?” feeling when I see a web-app emerging that’s doing the same thing as one before. What I mean is, how is this any better than Last.fm?

Now before you email me the obvious “oh-my-god you are clueless burn in hell” emails, let me clarify. I know Pandora and Last.fm work very differently. I also understand that it is interesting how Pandora finds new songs for you to listen based on what you’ve heard before. But if you’ve been using the (very recently redesigned) audioscrobbler/last.fm, you’ve seen this already. Ages ago, too. This doesn’t clarify much, let me get into the details:

How pandora works

Pandora works by finding out relevant tracks close to your tastes by analizing proprieties of the songs you like and getting you new ones that share the same proprieties. So if a song is calm and moody and you like it, pandora thinks you’ll like more calm and moody songs - and sends them your way. Okay, but what if I am a “kind of band” / attitude person? I mean, most people are. It will keep me around the same “calm and moody” song type for as long as it can.

I know you’ll listen to a lot of songs you’ll probably like. Because if you like the attributes of a song and you identify yourself with them, you will probably like similar songs. Correct, I’ll give you that.

How last.fm works

Last.fm goes through your musical taste and gets people that share all the kinds of stuff you listen to with you. And from all those guys, finds the most suitable bands or songs to play to you because people with similar tastes like them. This means with more people, the more knowledgeable the system is and the easiest it is to play tracks you’ll like.

The system learns and collects data from what you listen to, in order to be more informed of your musical tastes and continuously improve the knowledge base. Plus, you can track what your friends are listening to and get references from that too, because of the social network layer built into the system.

Comparing the two

Okay so which approach do you find the best? Personally, I quite like the latter. I like how I can get to last.fm, type a band I like (or not type any if the system already knows my musical tastes) and let it give me a suitable radio for me to listen to. Or, heck, forget the radio, just a list of what I’m probably going to like so I can buy/download/do whatever in my own pace.

Personally, I think last.fm came a bit too early and didn’t get all the hype new web applications are getting just because people like Scoble blog about them. But, for me, it is still the best musical service on the web today. In fact, if there’s something that makes me buy new music, it is Last.fm, not iTunes or Pandora, for example.

Now, let me give out some final notes. I don’t mean to bash Pandora, because I like how it works, I like how the application behaves (even though I don’t really like the looks), and I believe a little competition to last.fm in the musical discovery “business” is okay. But, well, it’s just not the better product. If it is going to get users? Well, yes, now that Scoble, Mike and everybody else are linking to it, but… That’s about it. Sorry.

I guess the best thing everybody should do is visit pandora and last.fm and take their own conclusions. Oh, and if you’re curious about my own taste in music, here’s a link to my last.fm profile.

I didn’t even know the guy was writing a new book and Michael Arrington, who I’ve worked with before on Techcrunch and will be flying out to SF to work with in some days, already has the scoop and is offering 50 copies on his website. If you’re into Seth’s stuff and want to save some dollars, get yourself some of the goodness Mike is spreading through the blogosphere. Cunning stunts!

The previous book by Seth Godin I’ve read, The Purple Cow, was one of the books that inspired me the most to get out of the coding trenches and start doing some work outside my CS degree. Most people still think marketing and sales are terrifying, but when Seth Codin’s writing about it, well, they don’t look half as bad. If this book is half as good as The Purple Cow, it will be another clear winner.

I sure as hell am getting my hands on this one. But I’ll probably pick up my copy when I get out of the airplane, anyway. That said, go try and nail a free book. Oh, and if you don’t know it yet, check out Seth Godin’s own blog.

Seems like it’s technorati hatred time all around the blogosphere. When I first posted about how I was unhappy about the new “way of technorati” of profiting from the blogosphere I asserted that the service would probably see a drop in its users. Now I was reading some posts and it seems like Kottke said the same thing a few days ago, and most recently, Fred Wilson.

This story has two main aspects, in my own opinion. The first, and the one I’ve mentioned before, is how I (and some more people) don’t like seeing technorati use it’s service to sell corporations new ways to influence the opinions of the blogosphere. I know it’s a business world, but even so, it’s something that leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I say “technorati”.

The second is, at least provide a decent service so people can cope with the dark side. I don’t necessarily keep a constant eye on the links to blog posts, but use it to check out news for events, particularly those of a technical nature, that are naturally prone to be blogged enough about. If Technorati isn’t able to give me that information, the reasons I might have to use it drop down to zero.

For now, it’s doing the job okay for the most part, but considering there are alternatives like pubsub and icerocket, I’d mind the service quality, if I was on technorati.