I had an idea to add tweets from registered DJs to the site homepage to give it more fresh and dynamic feel. So I hacked together a small script that fetched latest tweets from all of the DJs using Twitter API. After taking a quick look of the data, it was quite obvious that in practise, this wouldn’t be a very good addition to the homepage.

This is what I saw:

When you think about it, it makes sense. Most DJs aren’t really interested in Twitter or other social media (except sites like SoundCloud and Mixcloud, which in contrast are very important and much used), they just feel that they need to be there because everyone else is and promoting yourself is hard. Their tweets are mostly just plain adverts of upcoming gigs and very little actual content. DJs create their content as music, not as tweets.

This is actually a good example why it’s important to have deep understanding of the field in order to being able to create good services for it. I’m not yet very familiar with the whole DJ scene yet, which is why I often ask dumb questions from experienced DJs who have been in the business for decades. But I’m learning every day.

(This post was originally posted to my other blog called Spinning Code.)