last.fm

Why I love links

June 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton

By nature, I’m a frustrated librarian and a compulsive hoarder. My music collection is in alphabetical and chronological order, and my loft is packed with old video consoles and other collections which I know fatherhood will stop me from indulging in, except as family heirlooms in 30 years time!

Part of this is a reluctance to lend CDs and books, even to close friends, for fear of them being lost, or being returned with the spine of the book broken beyond all recognition.

But now access to knowledge and entertainment is instantly sharable from the moment of discovery. From the almost infinite resource of online knowledge I can share findings via links, Del.icio.us bookmarks, or RSS. My tastes in music are logged, and accessible via Last.fm, and TV and videos get distributed from Youtube, the BBC iPLayer, or where ever they’re found. And it doesn’t matter if my friends lose them, and they can’t return them broken. In fact, even if, God forbid, I lost all my saved files and links, I could find most of the memorable ones that mattered in a few minutes with Google.

There’s a popular quote by author and broadcaster Leo Laporte which has spread via shared links:

“I’m less likely to read print lately because I can’t tag, bookmark, and share the stories. Info gathering has become a social process for me”

And it rings true. Print and physical copies are now back-ups, or objects for sentimental value. They’re for those rare occasions that you want to get away from it all.

And that’s why I love links!

Internet usability demands centralisation

May 8, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Normally internet usability refers to the design and placement on a website to allow users to easily interact, but I firmly believe there’s an important new item which is hugely important in making any website, widget or service usable.

And that’s allowing centralisation.

Now I’ve moved to my own domain, I’m trying to update two years of links – on social networks, blog directories, wikis, forums, websites, other people’s blogrolls etc, etc, etc. And I’ve realised exactly how much work is involved in changing my url on all those sites. And that’s the same for all the major events in my life (such as the birth of my son recently), or even keeping minor details up-to-date and relevant (Do I still like the same music and films as I did when I filled out my Facebook profile, or the last time I updated Myspace?).

More and more people are online, and although the numbers of promiscuous profile creators are small compared to those who are happy with one site and profile, that’s changing. And it will change more and more as niche networks and groups form and grow – and advertisers etc see more value in targetting those niches.

It’s where ideas like Google Open Social work, with an API that works across numerous websites/networks. And although I don’t think it’s always suitable to limit every internet user to one ‘real’ linked ID, I do think it’s now essential that anyone collating information from internet users looks at the best way to allow that information to be updated from one central place. You might lose one or two clicks from someone being forced to update, if they see enough value – but the flipside is it’s too much hassle to update so people don’t bother coming back at all – ever.

And for something like a domain change, it can mean a website stops sending me any referrals, and drops even further off my radar.

That’s why something like Last.fm works, and why so many more users utilise its’ ‘scrobbling’ technology to track the music they listen to, rather than using it to find new music etc. If you’ve got a site which has a field to list music, don’t make me fill it out. Let me link to Last.fm, or Pandora. Or create somewhere that I can update once and feed out to all my various outlets. That’s one reason why Twitter works (I’m @badgergravling btw). A Twitter update can be done via a variety of desktop clients or other sources, and then end up on my blog, on FriendFeed etc, etc. Sites like FriendFeed are tackling the problem from the aggregation perspective, and allowing a huge range of inputs to be put into one place – but where’s a system for allowing me to make a huge range of outputs to all the relevant destinations without traipsing for hours around the net?

Myspace MP3 store is a huge threat – but not to Apple

April 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the new Myspace Music store will pose a threat to the Itunes and Ipod Applopoly. But I’m a little surprised by Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel being so ready to dismiss the threat to streaming music services.

The growth and success of Itunes, added to the image of Apple products and services, gives it a fairly secure position at the moment, and it would take something pretty revolutionary to overturn that. Certainly I’ve encountered enough people who have lost music collections from Ipods yet won’t switch to an alternative to realise Apple devotion works across all their products and services. And enough alternatives exist, even including supermarkets.

However, plenty of people already use Myspace to listen to individual tracks by their favourite artists, and offering a streaming radio service without limitations would make this option extremely attractive. And would seriously threaten several services.

I recently heard a stat regarding Last.fm which is pretty believable. Apparently just 25% of Last.fm users actually visit the website, with most using the ‘scrobbling’ tracking software, and possibly the downloadable radio player. It makes sense as the Last.fm site is hobbled by 30 second clips, and limits on the amount of times you can listen to individual tracks by specific artists. And although it does a reasonable job of finding similar artists, it won’t let you play the specific inspiration before sending you round the houses, which leaves the similar artists without any context. The arrival of Myspace could push Last.fm to concentrate on scrobbling and displaying widgets, which will either lead to new and interesting revenue streams, or could put a real chokehold on the traditional display advertising on the website.

Meanwhile Pandora.com is still on a U.S only lock down. And when you’ve taken something away from users, it puts you in a far worse position than when you’re launching for the first time. There’s no news on any re-opening to non-American markets, and in the meantime, along comes a site already extremely popular, and proposing free music streaming. Suddenly the non-U.S. world forgets Pandora exists. That’s going to limit expansion!

And then you have a myriad of small rival streaming services, like Meemix, which has a plethora of great add-ons and ideas around their music service – but has a corresponding amount of niggles and flaws, as if the ideas exceeded the ability to deliver in a simple and user friendly way.

Myspace can be far from user friendly – but enough people are already familiar with it and accept the problems to mean they’ll jumping all over new music options. And various research shows that the early adopters who jumped ship to Facebook etc are likely to still have a Myspace profile and pop in occasionally, so a fair few profiles could be fired up again to explore a new music option.

At the end of the day, it could be really good news for consumers, as Myspace plans to offer DRM free downloads (possibly pressuring others to follow suit), and it could prompt some serious thoughts about giving more value to users in the streaming market, and some serious attempts to differentiate and move ahead. It’s not often I praise and support Myspace, but for once their plans have my vote.

The easiest way to website and blog success!

March 25, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Whenever I look at websites or blogs, there’s one key ingredient which is essential 99.9% of the time. It’s so obvious it can easily be missed, and isn’t down to technology or snazzy design. And, despite my slightly misleading title, it can be the easiest and the hardest thing to create and maintain.

It’s focus.

To clarify, I don’t mean a dogmatic clinging to one aim or proposition set in stone for all eternity. In the social we we now inhabit you’ll need to change and adapt to the needs and desires of your potential and actual audience.

But there’s an overwhelming amount of ways and means to achieve your goals – and a similar amount of things you might wish to cover. No matter how big your team or organisation, by trying to be all things to all people you’ll end up spreading yourself too thinly, and doing everyone a disservice.

It’s a lesson I’ve sometimes struggled with in the past, and one that reappears with my current employment, my blog, and Disposable Media all asking for my time – in competition with my life offline.

That’s why I have to prioritise my work first, then my blog, then Disposable Media, and then anything else online.

It’s also why the blog I started to look at anything online which interests me is now increasingly about social media marketing, community marketing and social networks. It’s my work, my main interest, and the thing it makes sense for me to focus on.

It’s also why I value the reminders about priority from a colleague of mine, and why I’ve already seen how much value comes from her work in establishing clear propositions on some of the titles I work with.

As another example, compare Pandora.com (If you’re in the U.S. and still able to) with what I thought would be a good substitute, Meemix. Both have a streaming radio station of your preferences at their heart – but where Pandora was incredibly quick and easy to get going, Meemix is prettier and yet less satisfying. Meemix has games, profiles, and all sorts of lovely graphical interfaces – and yet for me it crashes, cut outs, and fails to load. And whilst I can understand their need to differentiate themselves from Pandora in the past, now that non-U.S. residents are looking for a quick musical fix, they could be serving the millions now searching for a replacement. Instead, it’s just as quick to go to Last.fm, and gain the extra social context it offers.

Mashable gets it’s own social network

June 7, 2007 By Dan Thornton

For ages, www.mashable.com has been a really good news site covering social networks, but now mashable man Pete Cashmore has thrown his hat into the social network provider ring with www.my.mashable.com.

It’s clean and simple to use, and fairly basic at the moment, but the most interesting aspect is that you can join networks for all the social sites you use, such as Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Pandora etc. New starters like Virb are also included.

My lovely new profile is here.

It’s quite interesting finding out exactly how many social sites I’ve signed up for, and seeing other users, but I’d hazard a guess that this is the first step towards integration across sites.