Maintaining all of your web services like Facebook, Twitter and Google + is a daunting task. When you’re a band promoting yourself on PureVolume, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, YouTube and Sonicbids, you really can’t have much time left for setting up and maintaining an additional web presence.
The solution? OneSheet
OneSheet
A single page that gathers and displays your band’s data from all the other web services.
Services like:
- ArtistData
- Bandcamp
- BandsInTown
- Bandzoogle
- Fanbridge
- Any hosted blog with RSS
- Next Big Sound
- Posterous
- ReverbNation
- Songkick
- Sonicbids
- Soundcloud (a personal favorite)
- Tumblr
- Vimeo
- WordsPress
- YouTube
Once you verify your band’s account (via Facebook or Twitter), OneSheet automatically looks for accounts on these services that match your band. Once you’ve confirmed or updated these accounts, OneSheet collects all the necessary data and populates a single page that contains videos, concert dates and music tracks. Make a few visual changes like uploading a background and changing a font or color and you’re ready to deploy.
The concept isn’t exactly earth-shatteringly original. Services like About.me and Flavors.me offer similar services, but the focus on musicians and amazingly simple user experience of OneSheet, combined with its obvious attention to aesthetics, makes it stand out.
Right now, OneSheet is free, although it is piloting a paid “pro” service that integrates domain masking (to use your own) and iTunes support. Check out the OneSheet blog for more info on that.
Church & API
Services like OneSheet convince me more and more of the rising importance of three letters in the web world: API.
OneSheet has used the APIs of about 17 web services to create content on their web app. In fact, besides a small amount of user preference data, OneSheet stores a significantly small amount of information for each user. Their content and services are based on collecting data from other services and handling/displaying it in a way that makes it unique and useful to OneSheet users.
APIs continue to become more and more important to the design and experience of successful web apps. Building a simple Facebook login option into your site or application can dramatically improve the user experience of people signing up or signing in. A few lines of code for a Flickr API call can eliminate the need for managing and updating photo galleries on your website’s back-end.
I’m not predicting a future where all websites are just a collection of other services’ API data, but I’d love to see the Church technology world making more use of data from dozens of web services their congregation already uses.
Would you use OneSheet?
Chris Ames says
Love it! Great find!
Dre' Barnes says
Brian, you hit the nail on the head! for Impact Church, I use Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Amazon, Church Community Builder, Twilio(Texting) and some others. I would love it, if Youversion had an API! Keeping the faith. But I really like where you are going here…hmm 🙂
Brian Notess says
Awesome Dre. Glad it resonated with others.