Welcome to Tea party. Media podcast. I am Marty Lindiscope. Hi, Mitch.
Hi, Martin.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well. It's Friday.
Yeah. What are you thinking about?
Well, podcasting and all the work I'm going to do this weekend because I'm an open source developer, so I do a lot of work on weekends, but it's fun for me.
Yeah, that's great. And now we are being live here also. So I will at the same time here check if it's hooked up on my Facebook and on YouTube we'll see if it's working on LinkedIn also. Yeah, look, cool.
Brilliant.
So two and we will see here, but when it's hard with multitasking. So I will concentrate on you as a guest. And here it's on Facebook and we will see if it will come to YouTube. It's all about these settings and the parameters. There I am. Okay. Live. Yeah.
Time work.
There were so called stereo or roundabout.
It's cool you do that demo because hopefully podverse will be in that rotation someday with live streams.
Yeah. And we could start with that. We recommend stopping the recording before hanging up the call. So that's one note to you, because this is streaming and recording at the same time. But depending on and I will check that we are using a service called Boom Coster. I check now on Mitch, you have yeah, good saying here on percent 80% upload. And I have that also. So it's when saying it's a good level.
Okay.
Because all this technical thing, you don't really want to mess with it, but you wanted to see and when you see this bar also going on as an independent developer and program, why did you start an app? And of course you have to give a plug what app is calling. And to joke. Now, I'm doing a shout out to Adam Curry and Dave Jones. We are competing with you now live because I know that you have a board meeting of Podcasting 2.0 podcast. So there you have something in your app that you could do.
Usually I'd be listening to them right now, but instead I'm talking to you.
But you picked the time also. And I did that also. It's the time difference.
Yeah, this time happens to work best for me. And yeah, what is a seven hour time difference or something like that? podverse is a free and open source podcasting app for iOS, Android, Fjord and Web. We try to add as many features as we possibly can and make it work across devices so you can have a synchronized experience. So basically one app that can work across all of your devices. And I got into it, boy, a long time ago when I started to learn how to code. It was like my main project.
I loved podcasts. I'd listen to them for a few years and I love that it's independent media, it's accessible to everybody. You can do it with very little money. I mean, there's some investment, but relative to the fact you can reach potentially anyone in the world with an Internet access, it's amazing to me. And so I listened to a lot of podcasts at the time and had a hard time sharing it with other people.
So I'd listen to a few that I liked a lot and I'd want to share moments with people and everyone else. They're watching Netflix or HBO, they don't know what I'm talking about, they're not familiar with it. So the origin of podverse was just to make a clip sharing app, to make it easy to share highlights. And on top of that, I've always been very passionate about open source software. So that was just kind of a given that I wanted to make it open source.
What started as a simple clip maker has now turned into an app with a ton of features, trying to do everything we can. And that's by design because I didn't want a separate app that I have to go into to make clips. I wanted one app that can do everything I need and also share clips because otherwise it's just not natural for me to be switching between multiple apps. It's just a little extra overhead.
That's how it all started and that was like nine years ago and I didn't know how to code at that time. I've had to teach myself as I go. And that's partly why it has taken so long, I think, to get it in a more mature state like it is now, where it's, I think, a pretty high quality user experience.
Yeah, I must say that it is. And I'm not the coder, I know HTML back in the day, but what kind of program language are you in order to do an app?
I do mostly JavaScript. JavaScript is the language that all websites use, basically. It's what browsers, natively support. And the interesting thing about JavaScript is that it's so widely adopted that you can write any type of technology with it, potentially. I'm not saying it's right for every technology, but you can do websites, you can do mobile apps, you can do data APIs. So in the Pod verse, it's all full stack JavaScript.
We have five different major code services and all five of them are like 99% JavaScript.
And, and funny about that, that's my so called humor. Java is, you know, a slang for a cup of Java. And it's coming from Indonesia, that's very famous for the coffee plantations, but also tea. So in the history they had some hard time with harvest, so they changed from tea to coffee and vice versa. I will drink with my tea.
Well, you would be the expert on tea.
Yeah, coffee too, maybe. Yeah. I'm a tour and I've written a book about black tea, my first in the series, and also the name there, tea Party media enthusiasts. So we could take that as some quick questions then. What's your relation to tea?
Well, I love hot beverages like coffee and tea. I have coffee on the table right now. Tea is more of an evening drink for me with less caffeine involved. Yeah, I love it. I don't know if I'm a connoisseur. I'll take pretty much whatever I have available.
Okay, and you are but you are based in if I may ask? There in in you could say in me, it's the central time. Right?
I'm in Chicago.
Yeah. So in the Windy City, that's expression, it's both climate but it's also political things, windy City. But I visit in Chicago twice in the summer and it was beautiful. But I know called being tea suset. She is a tea samull year and also with meditations on she has tea courses or tea trainings and very good. I was starting to subscribe to her tea and I got a notification from the postal office with the customs, but I have to pay a certain amount in order to import and handling fee.
But it's handpicked tea. So if you want to have really good tea, then you should check out Being Tea and Resources. But I know Chicago probably have some good stores and places you could buy like online, but also physical store, so but I know it's famous also for the coffee tradition and drinking beverage and it's good when you're coding. Right. You need to have that kick. Right?
It helps. Definitely helps. I mean, there's not pretty much any work it can help with as long as you don't overdo it and get jittery. But yeah, I try to keep the caffeine low because I don't like being too dependent on it. I like the taste so much. It's like a habit for me to drink. I don't necessarily need all the caffeine.
And I like the caffeine or tea in tea and I don't get rid of it. So maybe it's a mental thing or a physical, but then I could suggest an alternative to coffee and tea called Yarba Yarba Mate. And it's very popular in South America and there you get the kick but not like energy drinks and so on getting the slump. Also dump and that is fellow podcast called Evo Terra and he's very much into fiction podcasting and so on and he drinks yarbamat very much. So that's something maybe to check out.
So now when you have done these great launches and versions and with your as a co founder and programmers and your fellow team, how do you celebrate what's your party drink?
So that's part of my party drink. Yeah, I'm more of a beer drinker, nothing too exciting.
Do you have microbrewers in Chicago?
There's just hundreds or if not thousands of them. I like pale ales, typically I like a hoppy quality beer or IPAs. There's very few I don't like.
I think the darker beers that like the stout.
Yeah, I don't like the stout so much or the oatmeal.
You get like beer and bread at the same time. It's almost like a meal. It's very thick. And then of course, the Belgium, they have all kind of even sweet beers and so on, like cherry and flavored and other things like that. But that's interesting. Maybe people are wondering where Martin going now? But the beer market in America with micro brewers is huge industry combined. Yeah, and here in Sweden you had lots of small brewers first, then the big players bought them up like halsburg.
Probably the best beer in the world, so called is slogan. It's a safe bet, so to speak. And heineken and this kind of thing, maybe heineken is very slogan. But anyway, so then it was concentrated with a few players. But now it had been renaissance again for the microbrewers. But then you have all these regulations and how you sell it. And because here it's a monopoly. You can't go to like a drive thru liquor store. You have to go to a state owned store in order to buy beer and liquor in Sweden.
But now we have lots of to pick and choose from. And I see that a little bit of podcasting also on apps. First it was many or not, you have to program it yourself. Then it became some big players and now I see lots of things for different use cases and so on. Sure. I really like seeing that coming in the future. So that's good to know, drinking beer when you're celebrating. And you should because the app is fantastic. Thank you. And we'll go through it a little bit here.
Different features and what you could use with it and so on. But then we could take the thing directly because I know that you are for the freedom of expression and how to so called the little guy and this kind of approach. So what's your media when we have Tea Party Media, what's your favorite media outlet or social media platform?
Boy, I listened to so many different podcasts. There isn't a particular outlet. It's independent media that I typically like. I like ad free or like minimal ads. Let's see, I don't know because there isn't like a specific network that I listen to. As for social media these days.
People.
Are polarized and have all kinds of different ideas about it. But I like mastodon a lot. I like that it's open source, it's decentralized, it gives you an option to self host so you can start your own instance and moderate it, manage it however you want, invite people to it however you want. I tend to like things that are outside of the big tech dominance where you have the ability to do everything you want yourself independently. Other than that, I try to stay off of social media.
I'm on Twitter. Twitter is kind of a bad habit for me. I'm on it less and less but still scroll through it. But most of the other social media sites these days I don't really use. Probably there's opportunities there that I'm missing in terms of marketing for our business. It's hard for me to figure out marketing. I'm so wrapped up in programming I don't know where to begin sometimes with.
Marketing and we will talk about them. Then you could get like merchandise like Booze. Yeah, that's from Fountain. You could call them a competitor but also like friendly competition.
Fountain, sure, Fountain is supporting Podcasting 2.0 features. So Podcasting 2.0 being adding new features to podcasting and that is done by adding new information to RSS feeds because every podcast has an RSS feed. That is how you share your podcast with the world as you put your information in an RSS feed. And then every app has access to it potentially if they want access to it. So yeah, Fountain does value for value specifically.
Probably some other 2.0 features too, but most well known for their Bitcoin Lightning value for value feature which we also offer in Pod verse.
So that's what I'm seeing when I'm start playing around with new apps. You could have an app for everything and as a new media advisor, I also say that you have to go and find your own hub or create your own hub and then you could have satellites with social media. But I also see what we're doing with the algorithms. I hear you about that and we talked in the green room about Masturban and the Fedwe. I like the idea, but it could take some time before you're getting used to it.
Like the UX for example, you wonder why is it looking like this? Right? It's similar to when I went to Discord the first time. I didn't get that either. But now I get a feel for it and like it and especially with podcast index social and I mentioned that for using this boom cost and I mentioned that for Harry to ask for an invite or send an email because he really, I think could fit to understand what's going on.
So he was very interested when he heard about the lit and Live, because now we are live, so how could you combine it? But then of course, is it any market for it? How much will it take to program with somebody, use it, pay for it, how could you get supported? And now I'm going back and forth, but on Fountain I'm paying a premium in order to use the service.
And then if you do a boost to Gram, like sending a I call it a digital telegram with a note and then you could send a note of appreciation or token of appreciation with a small amount in so called fiat currency. But you can then play around with symbolic numbers like 1776, like the founding of America and that's like not even a dollar. It's interesting. But then you want to support the developer and the system that will continue.
So, could you tell a little bit about that? Because I saw when I done boost or streaming at Podvers, it's saying like a default of is it $0.50 or something like that?
Yeah, we have a default. We said it used to be ten and we bumped it higher recently because.
50 is not much at all, because that's one time, right?
Correct. Yeah. So the value for value features we have is you can send bitcoin to the show while you're listening, as you already explained, the two formats with one is to stream every minute. It'll send money on every minute of playing time. And 50 stats is about one penny right now, US dollars. And then there's also boost to Gram, which is a way to send a donation on demand with a message attached to it. And yeah, we've had it for about six months.
In Pod verse, we integrate with a service called Albi, and Albi makes it easy to you can kind of think of it as a payment processor. I shouldn't even say PayPal, but it's similar to a PayPal like service for.
People listen to this podcast, we know that we will get heated, maybe from Adam and Dave and others. I'm joking now, but you have to explain it somehow. Sure, that's the thing, because 510 years from now, people will say, did you do a boost or did you send a digital telegram? You streaming satouchi's. Right. Yeah, but now it's like, what are you talking about?
Yeah, it's still very new to everybody. So LB makes it easy to sign up with an email address. They give you a wallet. There's more advanced features, like you could connect your own Bitcoin node to it, but for just beginners, you could sign up with it. They give you a wallet. And then in Pod verse, you go to the Value for Value screen in the mobile app or the website. We have Value for Value on the website, too.
And you just log in your album account and then you're connected to Albie and podverse and you can begin sending boosts and stream stats that way.
Yeah, that's neat. How to do it? And also then you have a cap. And now I'm going back and forth and probably ask you to come again and we could dig in more because when at first time it's fun to play around and then you see what impact you could do and how you could be a part of you could say, almost like they call it co producers or producers in different podcasts and adding your two cent or how many satouches you want to send. But then, of course, it's this technical thing.
I mean, how to set this up, how many characters should you have in the note? How do you set the streaming sets, but it's safe and so on. So it's much things to think about, you take it for granted in a way, but it must be lots of thought and planning and testing and trial and error and so on. And that's why I like the friendly competition. I see how people really get inspired by it in a positive way by each other, but they have their own flavor and own style, right?
And it's interesting because we have a community of developers in Podcasting 2.0 and companies and in traditional business sense we're competitors because we're all trying to make a living doing this. But podcasting being that it's based on an open standard that everybody follows with RSS, there's benefit to all of us by working together on common problems. If the RSS host adds support for the lit tag, that's good for podverse because we support live streams with the lit tag.
And like I saw just today, that podcast addict is apparently planning on supporting the live tag. Now they're technically a competitor, but that's great news to see more adoption of apps of this live tag because that gives it a better chance of survival. That means the adoption will continue. That's going to be good for us and hopefully good for the whole ecosystem.
Yeah, we'll take that as a note that I said and here to do list. And then I wrote routine like Arrow and then routine and Chef because I told you one of the main advantages I think with podcasting is you could listen whenever you have time, for example, walking the cat or doing the dishes or shores and whatnot. But now I see my own behavior.
Now as I joked that we are competing with Adam carrying Dave Jones on Podcasting 2.0 podcast because they are now on Pod verse it's saying lit and you get a notification and then you could be in their livestreaming when it's happening. Then they could of course when they upload it as a finished podcast episode and so on. But now you could then send a telegram and almost be on air. You could say, right, it could be like boosting yourself but also giving you adding your two cent.
Also some inside jokes sometimes then you could have done that. If somebody's saying positive thing or constructive criticism, you could use it as a clip and say, look, I said this or this podcast said this about this issue, about my podcast or whatnot. So now with the live thing and they could read out the boost to grab and you feel that connection somehow. It's like almost like this.
I'm not a big YouTube following live streaming like that, but I understand the super chats, I see what's going on. People are I could add my two cent to the conversation and be really into the live thing, right? Yeah. But here is directly it's no middleman, taking a cart and so on and it's getting very close to connection.
So this I wonder if the behavior of podcast listeners will change over time when it's starting to get this fusion, but it will take lots of effort and things to come up with it. And then of course the use case if somebody will use it or not. So could you explain a little bit in layman person way what's the namespace and this list live item? I thought it was the live identity tag, but this live item tag right?
And what's it doing both in the back end but also for an active user using like podverse?
Sure. So coming back to RSS feeds, they're what the whole podcast ecosystem is based on. It's simply a file that contains your show information. That's all it is. You can just picture a text file in your head with all the show information and you put tags around certain information. So for the live item, that's a new tag. It says Podcast Live item and then in there basically you include a link to your live stream. So it's that simple from a high level technical explanation.
You just have a link in your RSS feed to your live stream with some other info like what time does it start, what time does it end, what is the title of the live stream? You put that information in your RSS feed and then it becomes available to every podcast app that connects to RSS feeds. And there's another service on top of that that's connected in this process. It's called a pod ping. And this is a service that has been created out of Podcasting 2.0 in the Podcast index.
And it handles sending events to apps to allow us to send notifications as soon as a live stream goes live with podcasting. So other apps that are centralized like YouTube or Twitch, they handle this in their own way, but they don't give other apps access to this information, not in the same way. So YouTube pushes their notifications. This never existed in a decentralized or distributed way until Podcasting 2.0 with this podcast live item tag. So yeah, that's about it then.
From a podcaster's perspective, the process right now is mostly being done by people who aren't afraid of like you have some experience with RSS feeds, aren't afraid of getting a little technical with how it works. But where it's going is it's hopefully going to be as simple as you log into your whatever your RSS host is and it just says Going live. And you type in your live stream title and say when you're going to start, press Start live stream, press Stop Livestream.
The service we're talking over right now, boomcaster. Something like boomcaster. Or there's a few alternatives. What they do is they handle behind the scenes live streaming to multiple services at once. So as you demonstrated the beginning, you went live on Facebook, on Twitter, I think on LinkedIn, yeah, YouTube. YouTube. There's no reason why a service like this couldn't potentially go live with the lit tag too.
And that would cover not just four different apps, it would cover every app that wants to connect to that live stream. So it's kind of like a one stop shop to be able to send it everywhere. Now, I don't expect YouTube to use the Live tag, but maybe hundreds of other apps will.
Great, that's great to hear because it's a non techy person. I played around with one app called Backpack Studio at Philhote and you could do Live Radio, but then you have to hook it up to some Ice Cost or some other things and I didn't know if I did it right or whatnot. But then again, it's the hosting that we will see and where I see the friendly competition again, like, Blueberry now announced that they have a long list of Podcasting 2.0 features.
Yeah, I'm very excited about that.
So this is interesting to see because again, it will be that you're getting more and more connected to the service and value that and you maybe use it more often and so on, because that's what Harry was saying. Maybe you don't do Live every day or whatnot you have to find how I'm adding value.
Maybe they don't want to joke, watch us to do it here, but if it will show things, different things, or maybe behind the face, behind the scenes and other things like that, or like bloopers or preshow, I don't know. Or you have a round table, you could do lots of things with it. But again, it is this technical barrier and this stumbling block, so to speak. But it's also fascinating.
You could say a bit more about comment coming from the thing about before regular World Wide Web when we had interrelated chat. So you have that chat that's pretty addictive, I must say. I jumped on before we start recording to joke a little bit. When I saw an education, Podcasting 2.0 Live, I was talking with Mitch soon, so see you later. So there can you explain about what's that so you have a chat feature function in the app so you could talk with others that listen to a live streaming show.
How does that work?
So this is another feature that any app can implement. So we're one, I believe Carrier Caster is another one. There's probably other examples at this point, but basically an IRC channel. As you mentioned, it's one of the longest running chat services that people have used for decades. At this point, Podcasting 2.0 has an IRC chat room and they give us a link in their RSS feed and then we just load that chat room in the app.
So while you're listening to Podcasting 2.0 Live in the player, you can just swipe over to see the chat room and start typing within the app. So that combined with boostograms the ability to send messages with donations, it allows a really interactive experience that is, I think, a really exciting development in podcasting. This never existed before. As you mentioned podcasting, one of the main benefits you think of is that you can listen at your convenience.
You don't have to tune in at a certain time, and that's true, and that will continue to be true for podcasting. But now you have this extra level where if you are interested in a live experience, you can get it within the same show. Like in the case of Podcasting 2.0, I get a notification when a new episode is a new episode that was recorded is now available and I also get a notification when it's live in progress. So if I'm available at that time, I'll tune in.
If they say something on the show I want to comment on, I'll send a boost to Graham during the show and throw 10,000 SATS or something and kind of bribe them to read my comment on the show.
Yeah, and of course they do it voluntarily, it's up to them. But they like it because it's adding content. And that's also the thing that you could make a clip of something, maybe why you should listen to that episode. You could give a teaser and you could do fun things like funny somebody is saying and I like that clip feature that you're doing. I've done it mainly, I think, on the web in a browser.
But it was very easy to pick a time and then do a clip, how long it should be, and then you could save it and then you could distribute it like tweeted it and that's probably that. You have to come back and talk a bit more about the whole thing because this could be gamification, it could be how many clips of an episode, popular clips and so on. But what I was learning, I was listening to podcasts and did screenshots when I mentioned my boost grams and other things like that.
I thought it was funny and interesting and then going back and making clip. But you did a comment there on Podcast Index Social, the Master Dawn thing that you could use if somebody's like Business Intelligence, what are they saying about Adam Carrie? Right, then you could search for his name in the transcript and find directly what's saying and then you can make a clip of that.
Right? So you're referring to the transcript feature, which is another Podcasting 2.0 feature. And it's kind of amazing to me that the industry hasn't already had a defined standard for transcripts because they're so important for accessibility. Obviously, if you don't have transcripts, then a significant part of your audience will not be able to hear your shows.
I'm open not for interrupting, but I'm open for the free market to decide, but it's even demands from certain groups that they will enforce it in the future. If you don't have this accessibility thing right, then you could be in deep trouble. I want voluntarily exchanged and private companies. Decide what to do and serve a customer. But I had one listen saying do you have a transcript? And I said yeah, I could get transcript but it's also who's paying.
Sure, you could do it manually and if you have a show now we have talking and it was great conversations. We definitely have to come back, Mitch. But if you take $2 per minute manually, then it's like $120, right? Sure. You cover that as a podcaster.
Yeah, and I don't know what the cost is. So you're speaking about well, if somebody manually does it yeah, I take that as an example.
But now with Chat PD, what is called and as I said, I heard from Pod News that Slack has started with it somehow for some reason. So if you put a podcast episode in Slack, it will automatically generate it interesting. And I have it in all the two the service that I also pay for editing and post production and so on. It's a good service, but simple in a way so that's included also for a certain amount of hours and so on. So it's getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper.
But again, it's this competition that has to come to play. That's what I'm saying. I like to have transcript, but then I have now I'm babbling here. You want also like todd cocker and saying having your own domain and your own hub. If you're giving out everything like transcript, why should they listen to the podcast? But mainly it could be that it's add on and you want to see now we're here on the live stream. We could do a caption at the same time. I'm not doing it this time.
But then people even don't have to listen to our voices, they could read it. It's funny, but many people are before they start watching a video and so on, they see the caption. So it could be used for many reasons. So please give your reasons and also what you're thinking in order to get this going.
Well, one of the main is obvious for accessibility. So people with deaf people can like hearing hear the podcast but it also is just advantages you touched on that you can search through the transcript to find what moments something was said. So let's say you're super into bitcoin and you want to find out when was bitcoin talked about in this podcast. You just go to the transcript. We have this implemented in podverse.
You just open the transcript and type in the word bitcoin and it'll show you every timestamp where it was mentioned. It's really handy when you need it. Like if you're listening to a two hour plus podcast and there was a moment but you were out at the grocery store, you didn't have time to make a clip or make a note of it. You just search for the keywords and you find it right away. It's super handy I don't know how affordable it is for podcasters.
I believe Buzz Sprout is one that by default they generate AI transcripts. If it comes in standard from RSS host, that's awesome. Then the podcaster doesn't have to really think about it, just upload your MP3 and it's included in your monthly whatever you pay per month to the service.
Where is it going? It's hard to say of all the podcasting 2.0 namespaces because of the reasons you mentioned about how there are countries where there are regulations that would seem to say if you're a giant corporation you should make your content accessible. It seems like one that could be adopted potentially by a major app. I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
But I would think a company like Apple with their distributing podcast content all across the world, I would think they would be interested in transcripts.
For example, like James Credlin and Sam said, they discussed that Pod News review but when you search for or it was maybe yeah, it was New Media Show with Todd and Rob. They talked about James Creedland had written like a report on that how the potential of the search in Apple because they searched the title and search some other things but not many other tags and so on. So it's hard to find.
And the Google who is good at search, you find it on the web but that's for the so called reasons because you'll enter there. How should they have played with the RSS so you get into their system, so to speak.
Sure, I hadn't really so that's what.
I like with your Pod app, for example, that it's easy to use it and then you could swipe and say now I want to see the transcript, now I want to see the show notes and so on. So please continue.
Oh well, I hadn't even quite thought of it that Apple or Google with the power of like advanced search engines can use the transcripts to help you search in advanced ways for any podcast that gives you all the speech in a text format that then becomes something they can index and you can search on.
So there's another we'll see one service called what's this called? Ivy dot FM I think yeah, I.
Met I met I want to say his name is Mike but I can't remember. But I met him at podcasting, podcast movement in Dallas.
Yeah. So so that could be something searchability and so on. So and that's again coming and wrapping up in a way but as a listener but also fellow podcaster starting listening when other podcasting commenting on things development and then you have heard it some other place or found something, then you could give like a feedback loop or a comment and that's adding to the conversation again.
So I will send a tweet and maybe do a clip on this new Media show about Ivy and then put them into the loop and see what's going on. And that's thanks to what I'm listening to with them also. But then it's good to get reminded about because it's very easy and I bet I understand that's the challenge. If you're used to like big players, for example, listen to music and if that app also could have podcasts, then it's very easy to use that kind of app, right?
That's why you should go to new podcastapps.com or search for that hashtag on Twitter. I'm trying to doing a thing about that when it's very active.
And you're one of our biggest promoters for Podcasting 2.0, so maybe you should.
Start with I know that you are. Do you want to talk a bit more about podverse? You are a small unit or team here. When is the merchandise coming, the nice blue headphone?
I don't know. Well, we operate on an open source budget here. We have no investors, all of our expenses come out of pocket. We do have a premium feature, all of the software is freely available, anything, anybody can download all the software we have and deploy it and do anything they want with it. But we do charge for a premium membership which gives you access to our server side features like syncing across all of your devices.
In order to use syncing, that requires us to have a server running that you can post information to and there's costs associated with having a server running. That said, we also operate on the value for value model. So if $18 per year is too much, we'll give you a free membership. You just have to email us and tell us what email address you want a free membership with. That's kind of doing like a middle ground here. We don't make it like so you just sign up.
We do give you a three month free trial.
That's what I tested and then I got reminded of it. Now it's starting expiring, should I do that? And of course I wanted to support it. And then now when you're here you could then explain what's the added value and the features and so on. And now we have done that in a way. So maybe you want to explain a little bit more about that, what's maybe coming in the future?
Sure, in the near term. Well, we're focused on live stream in particular because there's some exciting growth happening here with new players, new apps, new RSS hosts, and new podcasters jumping on board. So we want to make sure that we provide the best possible live stream experience. That said, we do far more than live streams. We have traditional podcasts listening too and we hope that it were as good as any app you can get for that purpose. Live streams in particular.
Another feature I hope to get done before the spring is Android Auto. We added Apple CarPlay about a month ago and that was one of our most requested features. We have like five times more Apple users than Android, for some reason. Not entirely sure why. So Android Auto is next on the list. That's one of the other major features we want to add besides that. To be honest, I'm kind of in like a regrouping phase. We got so much stuff done in 2022.
We had over 50 releases for mobile, so, like a release per week on mobile that includes either bug fixes or new features. And we're pretty happy with the new stability and there's better performance. It just seems like a more complete app than it did. Much more complete than it was in the beginning of 2022. And at this point, I'm I'm actually like scratching my head, like, thinking, like, where do we go next?
What's our what's our big move next? Android Auto is a big one because podcast listening happens so frequently in cars that we definitely want that in. There's other stuff, like, we have F Droid, which is a free and open source app store. So Google is in charge of Google Play. Then there's an alternative store that's available on Android called Fjord, and they require all of your software to be open source, and they don't allow you to use things like Google Services.
They don't allow you to use the big tech stuff. Okay, so we don't have notifications supported on Fjord yet because on iOS and Google Play, we use something called Google Firebase to send those notifications. So all that to say, we actually get a lot of engagement from Android users because people in that community really care about really care about this stuff. And there aren't that many options available for them, but they don't get notifications currently.
So that's another feature I'd like to add. I don't know how soon that will be, though. And then another one that I talked about on Podcasting 2.0 is Cross App Comments, which is we want to provide the ability for podcasters to have one comment thread that is available in every app. So from any app, you're able to send a reply to that podcast in a thread. And we have the ability to do it. We can do it with Activity Pub, or Macedon as it's more commonly known.
And it's achievable and the surge of attention that Macedon has gotten in just the past few months, going from this obscure thing for computer nerds to all.
Of a sudden, you know, stay alone for that.
Yeah, all of a sudden it's like, relevant, whether people like it or hate it, whatever. By the summer, I'm hoping that we have an implementation given. We can decide if it turns out to be easy. Maybe it takes a weekend or two. We work fast, but this is territory that isn't implemented in any other podcast app yet.
Yeah. And for me, as a long time blogger since 2002, I thought in order to be a cordial blog, it should have the timeline, the latest post up and then you have a unique perma link that's created automatically and then possibility with comments I think.
But nowadays it's not so common anymore because for spam or that people are on other places and so on so I would be very happy to see that again but you could really add your two cent and then maybe somehow pay micro donation or SATS in order to do that. So you will get rid of the spammers or patrols and what what not so, but it is lots of things to to grab and to get around in order to work on everything.
Right?
That would be very interesting to see if that's searchable or you could go back and see what was that comment, Fred? And then you could go to Mastodonofadiverse or podcast index social or whatnot and even maybe a search. I saw the latest was that Medium was going into the mastodon also but then they are more short form and then relating to their platform. So it's very interesting how this could play out.
Thanks again for your time Mitch and we'll do a wrap up here and also this ask thing and value for value and I will ask you a guest to do that but as an end now I understand your why, but do you want to end? Why are you doing this, Mitch?
Sure. Well, I'm passionate about independent media and open source software and it doesn't seem like if we don't do it, I don't know who will. There are a lot of passionate people who work on independent projects to keep big tech from controlling everything.
It's bugged me for past 20 years how we'll see a great technological innovation and then within a few years it just seems to get consumed by one or two companies and they get just this disproportionate control and that doesn't have to happen with podcasting. It's kind of open in its nature.
So that's a big reason why I'm so passionate about this is I want to do my part to make sure that it stays this open and accessible media format, that it's affordable and that it can do all of the cool things that you can get from a centralized big tech sort of platform. That's what motivates me.
That's great to hear. And also you have done lots of good, unique selling points or position or preparation or how you call it. But it's a bit of a rabbit hole in a way, when you start playing around with new apps. And it's fun to test different ones for different reasons and different use cases, and you're developing over time. But what would you say is like why should listeners out there listen and use podverse?
Well, it's hopefully the best podcast app listening experience you can have. I think the main selling point for a casual listener is the ability to sync across all of your devices that you can listen on your phone, you can drive to the office, you get into your workstation and you can pick up where you left off on the website and you can go back and forth.
In that way you can share clips easily, you can get notifications for when new episodes are available and also if you get further down the rabbit hole, start sending boostograms to and start interacting and supporting the content creator directly. If you get on board with the Value for value feature and you give it a try like now that I'm used to using it, it's a lot of fun. I can send messages with money attached to the creators I want to support.
I hear them reply to me because they most for the most part they'll they'll respond to you when you send a message. And also I stream money. I send about two cent current rates per per minute right now. And you know, it it's actually a good feeling to see like I'm listening to the show but I'm also it's like an active thing that is happening. I can see every minute it sends another two cent to the creator and there aren't that many platforms that allow you to do that.
We have a lot of exciting features so podverse should do everything that you would hope it would do and a lot more than that too because we're adopting all these cutting edge features.
Yeah and you definitely have come back and we talk more about that mindset like James Credlin said, maybe doesn't sound much but even if you have not maybe a very big audience. This is a small podcast but people are taking this active choice.
It adding up both as a boost, really positive boost that somebody's listening and comment and I'm all for lurking and people could say it in private and so on, but doing that but also streaming and saying if you have like Apple Service Music or whatever, or another service that you pay every month if you say, oh, I have this budget for podcasters and stream certain amount and you could change it up and down and whatnot, but it is this mindset and starting doing that, but it needs
some education, entertainment, engagement and getting there. But I really see that and it's also real money. It's bits of a bitcoin sure. So it's adding up. I mean it's really fascinating about that. So we definitely have to come back and talk more about that. Maybe digging into the mental thing about it and the mindset and what we could do. So again call to action is download and test a new podcast app like podverse FM I think definitely do that and spread the good word.
Make a clip, make a fun clip of what we are talking about. Send a boost to Gram streaming sets, get the notification when I'm getting live in different and thanks again for bouncing back and forth and maybe with Harry in the future could implement something or some other things. So that's good. So with that said, if you have any ending notes or you could make the ask for me if you want.
No, I would just say, as you already mentioned, podverse FM, if you're interested, that's the website available on iOS, Android and FID and yeah, please give us a try. And we're very responsive. If you want to reach us on Twitter or Macedon or by email to contact at podverse FM, we're happy to reply. We try to answer within one or two business days.
Great. So, again, thanks for your time, Mitch, and thanks for you out there. I'm waving live to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and also people downloading and listening or streaming. So, again, go to new podcastapp.com and download a new podcast app like podverse. So thanks again, Mitch.
Thanks, Martin.
Key you.