Weekend Inspiration: Killing Persistant Earworms With Unhearit

It’s happened to all of us. You are sitting in complete silence, maybe drinking your morning coffee, maybe checking email for the first time, when it first appears.

“Po- Po- Po- Poker Face, Po- Po- Poker Face…”

You do your best to ignore it, to think about other things, to distract yourself, but before long, it’s fully lodged in your brain.

“Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!”

You, my friend, have an earworm, and a brand new website called Unhearit wants to help. You go to the site, and click a button, and the embedded player plays a random song. The new song is supposed to help you get your mind off the one you’ve been humming all day.

Unhearit is a dead-simple application. The songs are  already there, stored on parent site SoundCloud. The player seems to be basically the same as what is found on their site as well. I’m guessing this page took them no more than a day or two to throw up, most of that time spent on making sure it wouldn’t come crashing down under the load of viral traffic.

Oh… and they have 2,575 Tweets and over 16,000 Facebook Likes as of when I’m writing this.

This week’s inspiration: SoundCloud cleverly re-purposed existing content to create a viral success with Unhearit. How are you going to do the same?

Let me know in the comments.

Friday Firsts: RIP, Geocities

It was with heavy heart that I read Computer World’s report that internet icon GeoCities was not merely decommissioned but deleted outright earlier this week. I confirmed with my own visit to the site, www.geocities.com, only to be greeted with a somber message: “Sorry, GeoCities has closed.”

What is GeoCities? you ask, and what kind of Friday First is this? Well, chock-full-of-questions reader, I’ll tell you. If you are a nerd and/or geek of just about the right age, that age where you’re just making the transition from young to still-young-but-not-quite-as-young-anymore, GeoCities was a first, and a big one.

Webhosting was prohibitively expensive in the 1990′s, and websites were generally purchased by big businesses who were just branching out into the internet. When GeoCities hit the scene, offering free, easy-to-build homepages structured into “neighborhoods,” that all changed. Suddenly, any nerd could post his X-Files fan fiction, or cheat codes for Doom, or just a simple “this is me and who I am” page, peppered with “Under Construction!” animated gifs. It was awesome.

Your Uncle Fat Dude is feeling a little nostalgic today, and it’s not just because his third decade on this planet is a little more than a month from coming to a close (now accepting gifts and cash!). I remember building my first homepage on GeoCities. I couldn’t tell you what “neighborhood” it was in, or exactly what I put there, but I do remember how epic it felt, to type a few words and paste in a picture, and know that it could be instantly viewed from all over the world.

I feel lucky, privileged, to have lived to see the infancy of the internet, to have played my infinitesimal part in it, and to see it grow to the world-altering tool it is today.

So, this Friday, I pay respect to the provider of my first website, and one of the first companies to proclaim that the internet is for everybody. I’ll miss you, GeoCities.