An email just went out notifying the userbase of Fuzz.com that the service will be shutting down on Feb 13… the day the new Jason flick hits theaters. It’ll be a bitter sweet day indeed.

Update: The good folks at TechCrunch ~just posted an article about Fuzz’s descent to the Deadpool.

A bunch of people have asked me about Fuzz & Blip.fm so here’s what happened….

I was working at Topix with Tolles, Skrenta and a bunch of other smart folks but wasn’t really getting into the groove there. About 15 months in a buddy of mine called telling me that a few of his friends were going to found a new music based social network. Being a guitar player & bass player (can’t call myself a musician) I was immediately intrigued & setup a meeting with the folks @ Fuzz.

After some thinking I decided that these Fuzz guys n gals shared my passion for music and the thought of creating a great web destination for bands & fans would be pretty fucking fun. So I did it… i joined up as the first engineer.

I hired the team and we create, what we believe, was a pretty badass set of tools for artists & fans. But, we all know “better” doesn’t always matter. We had the classic chicken & the egg problem: it was tough to get bands to really participate & without them & their music it was a tough sell to fans to get them to hang out on the site.

We had a bunch of support. The folks from AFI, Maldroid, Cake, BYO Records, Exodus, Alkaline Trio, The Lovemakers, Aaron Axelson from Live 105 & Tom Morello all kicked ass at supporting us but “everyone’s on MySpace” became our broken record. Hell, we even hosted an Alkaline Trio show at Cafe Du Norde as an attempt to generate more buzz & traffic. It was hard.

Bla, bla, bla… so anyways. We built a ton of features and one of the biggest was something we hoped would go viral and all that good stuff. It was a custom Mixtape generator: it was this crazy Flash app that looked like an actual cassette. You can see some screenshots on Mashable and other places. The whole thing was customizable: You could customize the background, the cassette’s stickers, the text, drop extra widgets on there (bullets, matchbooks, dime bags, images etc), add cracks to either side of the the cassette’s case etc. It was pretty insane. You could populate it w/ music from Fuzz or upload MP3′s etc. Oh, and you could embed it on any page. It was pretty insane… the cassette actually flipped over when you skipped tracks, the tape rolled etc. But alas this didn’t take off as much as we hoped. It was too big & bloated and took quite a bit of time to customize & load. Meanwhile other leaner & quicker apps like Mixtwit, Mixaloo etc (i think that’s what they were called) popped up and got way more attention/traffic but were way less cool.

Anyways… that’s a long story but it’s important cuz that’s where Blip came from. It was my task to re-spec the Mixtape. I was supposed to reduce barrier to entry, optimize the flow to increase adoption, make it leaner so it would load quicker etc. So I spent a couple days thinking. I smoked a ton, walked around a lot, didn’t write code and just thought about this “problem”/task. That’s how I am… I just sit there & it may look like I’m just slacking off but I’m thinking; I have to “see” the product in my head. Once I “see” it I have a simple way to vet it out: If I can’t sleep b/c my excitement keeps me thinking about the product then I figure it’s worth going after.

One of the most important aspects of this little “thinking” quest was my relationship with Ian – my right hand man at Fuzz. Ian’s a great engineer & one of the few people I’ve met that I can all out argue with. Almost every single detail about almost every feature on Fuzz was maticulously scrutinized over by the two of us. These little whiteboard sessions would often erupt into verbal brawls: “fuck you! that’s stupid!”, “are you kidding me? that looks like shit!”, “fine, then you Photoshop it”, “alright I will since… you’re shit sucks”… “dick”. If you didn’t know us you’d think we hated eachother. Neither of us held back on the other but our mutual respect kept the rage to the whiteboard. Two minutes after a huge arguement we’d take off leaving the folks in the office thinking that we hated eachother & were going home. But, we’d take off together… usually stroll over to the liquor store to get smokes, chips, vitamin water & beer meanwhile continuing the discussion. We’d get back to the office joking around all jolly ‘n shit then get right back to it. At the end of one of these session we’d usually come to an agreement on a solid idea & we’d start coding… 7pm, 10pm, 2am, didn’t matter… it was back to work. This happened a lot & we never got mad at eachother. We both understood that the other just wanted things to be better & respected that. This is how we did it and our personalities allowed for this. I’d never get into it like that with anone else. But w/ Ian we both knew that the other could take it and we’d eventually agree, hug it out and start typing.

Blip wasn’t born out of a big arguement like that but that dynamic w/ Ian was instrumental. At that point we were both pretty burnt out. I’d started thinking about the new Mixtape and the main thought that was going thru my head was “trash it” as opposed to “fix it”. I had 1 spec that was good but not “it”. So, obviously, I turned to Ian. I started telling him about the beginings of an idea I had that I was calling “Tweem”… Twitter + Muxtape/Music = Tweem. That was the start. I had just gotten addicted to Twitter & was wondering what the appeal of Muxtape was… but combining the two, Tweem, that made sense to me. “Tell me why you picked this song!”, “What are you listening to”… and more importantly “why?”.

That was my idea & I ran it by Ian first… didn’t tell anyone else. Ian started thinking interaction, UI and all that jazz. We started rapping about how you’d use it, the flows, vanity url’s & other details. “What would make it fun?”, “Where’s the music come from?”… “We’ll figure it out… internets” I replied. Ian asked all the right questions & filled in the gaps & metaphors: “DJ’s” not “users” all that stuff. We both liked it. If Ian didn’t buy it that woulda been “ok” and maybe I’d still try n run with it but when we’re both on board it’s usually a good sign. So we embarked on our secret mission…. Tweem.

I started hacking on the API stuff to source the music. That was pretty trivial. Ian started working on the main UI: The player controls at the bottom, the keyboard shortcuts, the scrolling & all the other nice UI touches. After the API I started writing the MP3 player. With Ian working out the interaction etc he suggested we go with an invisible player & just use JS callbacks for controls…. that made learning Flex easier and suited the app better as well. Soon thereafter I wrapped up the player & started feeding Ian’s UI real data as opposed to the mock objects he’d started with.

This took us a couple days… 2, 3, 4 days – something like that. There was random code being checked in that the other 2 engineers knew nothing about. “What’s this new `tweem` table? What the hell is the ‘TweenService’ class?”… “Oh, nothing”. It was pretty funny but we let the cat out of the bag to the other devs over a cigarette break. We kept the CEO and other bosses in the dark for a bit we knew we had to show them cuz talk would not work. Same as Twitter itself… the bare words explanation doesn’t really convey how rad the app is.

Less than a week in we had a working prototype and played with it within the engineering team… finally we showed the bosses and the rest of the staff after that. They all dug it and the whole Mixtape re-spec project was thrown on the back-burner. Luckily Ian hated the name “Tweem” and came up with an alternative: Blip… Blip.fm & bought the domain name which was clutch a couple weeks later. After a couple days of internal use we got the green light and launched it on http://fuzz.com/blip as a feature of Fuzz… but I always had an alterior motive; this was going to be a different site and I knew it.

And that was that… we got some press, traffic went up and the execs made the call to pull it off Fuzz and make it it’s own site. We got some servers ready and I spent about a week redoing the MVC framework, templating engine and data access layers then the team refactored fuzz.com/blip to blip.fm (again, thank God Ian bought the domain). On launch night (around 3am or so) we accidentally dropped the Users table from Fuzz. Whoops. God bless backups! But otherwise it was a super smoothe move since it was an all new codebase & db schema.

So that’s that… that’s the whole, long, story of how Blip.fm came to be and how it’s related to Fuzz: same team, different site.

It’s sad to see Fuzz go cuz we all worked so damn hard at it but that’s how this web world goes; hard work & a lot of features taht you think are cool doesn’t always win. Luckily Blip’s there to soften the blow. A great many of us have seen sites we’ve worked on go away but it’s kinda rare for the same team to have an alternate product that’s doing good. Same team… different site.

On a personal note: I left Blip a while ago… maybe 4 or 5 months ago and am stoked to be working at Digg now. I’m really proud of Blip, their success and the work I did w/ the folks there. I’m still super good friends with everyone at Blip too; It was one of those situations where the folks at work became my best friends. We spent a ton of time together and all got/get along perfectly fine. This tends to cause some confussion & some people have asked if I still work there or if Blip’s just a side project of mine. Neither. There’s a great team there doing awesome stuff & keeping that site humming w/ the continued increase in traffic. Yup, I know what’s going on there b/c we still talk… we’re friends but I haven’t contributed any code since I left (my last project was writing their API).

So, RIP Fuzz.com. It was an ambitious goal w/ the right motives but it wasn’t in the cards. Viva Blip.fm.