So, the 14 of you that still swing by here know my backstory. Sometime in 2003 I joined a band with a neglected website. At one of my first band meetings we discussed overhauling said website, since the majority of our fanbase was a grassroots kinda thing and most of our promotion happened via online channels like the Archive and YahooGroups, etc. Sometime in 2005 we still had that same website. I was at my parent’s house in north Georgia when it occurred to me “hey, you know, you could probably learn how to build websites in the time that it’s going to take this band to get it together enough to hire someone to do it.” If I’d only listened to that voice more clearly, but instead I got bogged down on the Dreamweaver section of the Adobe site and gave up without really exploring what web development was all about. I was still trying to be a musician in any case.
Fastforward to 2008 and we’d finally done something about our website a few months prior. I got an iPhone. I’ll skip this part of the story since it’s been documented ad nauseum on this blog. Anyway, it didn’t take long for the potential of mobile apps as a huge and brand-spanking-new market to become an obsession. In particular - the potential for such apps to help revitalize a music business that had become very long on the latter and very short on the former. There’s also the simple fact that in 50 years people are going to be on these little things and not big old screens anymore and therefore the internet is at the very least going to need to be reformatted. So, start learning to program iPhone apps…
Hey, this is hard to do yourself and really expensive if you hire someone. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could make a reusable framework for all your friends’ bands so that y’all could share the cost and the rewards of such a system? Well, if you’re all sharing a mobile platform, you might as well be sharing a website platform too, since most of the stuff that’s gonna be on that mobile app is going to have to live somewhere on the internet. It’d be a lot easier to just interact with one protocol than a million, right? If I’m not making sense, let me know.
Well, hey if we got everyone on the same platform for their website, then we could also build in lots of features that would make those sites more interactive with the rest of the internet as a whole. I mean, who likes posting your tour dates to your own website and then to Facebook and then to MySpace (or paying someone to do that for you)? Raise your hand if you know what an API is, and why it’s important. Wow, it seems like 10 years ago that I wrote that.
This was my thought process two years ago. I’ll be back.