One of the most exciting things that Twitter enables is getting a sense of people’s experience as it’s happening. Preserving that real-time sentiment around a gig seemed like a natural move to us. On one level, you can see what people thought about gigs you missed out on, but more interesting to us is preserving the sentiment around gigs that then go on to be historic. We were partly inspired by this great Nirvana fansite that transcribes everything Kurt said on stage. That probably wasn’t too interesting in 1990, but now it’s FASCINATING for music geeks like us. Imagine if you could read tweets from Clash gigs?

Of course, this real-time technology is very new and we’re still figuring out how interesting it is for the live music experience. Maybe it’s geeky and no one really cares, but we’d rather try it out and see how interesting it is than stay a passive skeptic and never take a risk.

I’m sorry you can’t see the point of Songkick. That means we’re not doing a good job of showing you how we can a) help you find upcoming gigs and show you where to buy tickets and b) how interesting the rich media around concerts can be. Doing a better job of that is something we’re focusing on.

I think a common problem with start-ups is that they don’t get usability right from the outset. If users get turned off there’s no second chance.

Also a live twitter feed. So what?

From a user’s perspective, the site is clunky, usability is really bad, and s l o w . It’s not going to attract users (well it might) but those users aren’t going to spend 12 hours adding every gig they went to. It’s such a chore! Hard work!!!!!

I really can’t see the point of this.

I think that’s why it’s not been done before.

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It ruins the atmosphere enough having 200 digital camera displays spoiling your view of the stage…then the people scrolling through the photos and shit. Why can’t they just enjoy the gig when they’re there?

We’re certainly not interested in being a closed off social network, just a great place for people to share amazing experiences of live music. I’d love for you to give us a try as it sounds like you go to a lot of shows. Twitter is inherently open, so as the other commenter notes, this certainly isn’t us moving to becoming closed.

We’ve also opened up in the form of an API which partners of ours like Songbird use to pull in concert information and share revenue from any resulting ticket sales. We’ve also participated in the last couple of Music Hack Days in Berlin and London to spread awareness of this.

On the subject of hashtags, we considered lots of options but #songkick seemed a simple choice to start with. the #live hashtag unfortunately looks like it’s been taken over by porn spammers from a twitter search but we could consider allowing users to choose an alternative hash perhaps.

thanks again for the feedback.

ian