Entry tags:

hacking, ilike, pandora

iLike, you have eaten my metaphorical lunch
I discovered a pretty cool and useful Facebook app named iLike a few days ago. It implements the "show me bands I like who are touring near me" very well, and it has all other nice kinds of social features built in. It's done way better than something that I could hack up in my spare time, and hence, I quit!

My only complaint is that it's very much designed for itunes and it doesn't provide a way to automatically import data from anywhere else. The interface does support a comma separated line input for favorite bands, however. So I hacked up a Pandora scraper. The Pandora scraper will get not just favorites, but also bands that you simply thumbed up more than once. As a bonus, it will print scores for each artist that are in your stations. It will run with any non-ancient version of Python, I tested with 2.4.

Here are the top 5 scores for me.

rob:~/code/more_live_music/src$ python pandora_parser.py rrenaud@gmail.com | head -n 5
Alanis Morissette 30
The Doors 28
Foo Fighters 26
Oasis 20
Red Hot Chili Peppers 18

The scores are simply the number thumbed up songs + 10 bonus for being in favorites.

Speaking of Pandora, please, please get a clue with your ads. I was listening to a station titled "Brett Dennen Radio", my location is set to New York, NY, and Brett had a show in New York in 3 days. What kind of ads was I seeing? McDonald's ads. Hint, I am a vegetarian, that's also in my profile. With ads targeted that poorly, maybe they just don't want to earn any money?