Reid Dossinger

I’m one of the many people who love last.fm. I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it’s a great site for music sharing.

And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked.

Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon—companies with more than enough resources to finish the job—to give us something great?

What people want from a social music site:

• To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm)
• To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking

What I’d love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show you a constantly updating stream of what your friends are currently listening to. I think that would be extremely addictive.

But the simple would be easy to implement. So why hasn’t anyone done it? Apple even bought Lala and would have easy access to people’s iTunes XML files and yet still failed mightily with Ping. Maybe Google has something up their sleeve for Google Music and Plus, but how tough would it be to, say, have your thumbs up tracks show up in Buzz? Or be able to put what you’re listening to now in Google Music on your profile page?

It’s too simple of an idea for it not to be done better already.

The tech blogs are all aBuzz (see what I did there?) about the first peek at Google’s long-time-coming entry into the social field, Google Plus (or, as they awkwardly write it, “Google+”).

Google is being smart here, and that’s not a phrase I’ve used much in the last couple of years. They know that no one’s going to abandon Facebook for something that’s the more of the same except Google, so they seem to be just launching it almost in the background. That is, that they’ll launch it, explain it, and then let people find the uses for it as it, rather than doing some massive product announcement/launch, which will lead to inevitable disappointment.

Now, whether this can be a useful tool is anyone’s guess. Their slick line of “We believe online sharing is broken” is right, or at least close. Social media is in a constant battle to stay interesting, accessible and understandable. It’s possible that Google’s Circles, Hangouts and Sparks will be the next leap forward, but it’s also just as likely (or even more likely) that they’ll just be more confusing Buzz (see what I did there?) words that keep it from ever being adopted.

If there’s one part of it I’m interested in, it’s the Circles. As someone who keeps two separate identities to keep the professional/not-offensive parts of my online personality distinct from my random, swearing, politically-opinionated personality, I would love to see a better way of doing that than the clunky “groups” feature. I have hope, but Google’s policy of being half-baked has dashed my hopes before.

One of the bigger “we’ll see” tech announcements in a while…

My Google Music invite came through a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure what took so long, since they surely would want an internet superstar like me who has ALMOST A DOZEN RSS SUBSCRIBERS to give it a whirl, but whatever. Google, ammiright?

The short story of the pros: it’s pretty slick for something that’s playing from the cloud. The short story of the cons: it still falls well short of what I’m looking for in a cloud music player, which I could also say about Lala’s old player, Amazon’s and even what little I’ve seen of Apple’s offering. I’m picky.

You can drag and drop songs within playlists, which is nice. There’s not a way to create automatic playlists like iTunes’ fantastic smart playlists function, but I would guess that feature is coming. 

Uploading: The uploader is extremely slow, but it’s also made me realize that my problem may be in my wireless connection. Other people have reported that they’ve uploaded 1000 or so songs in about half a day or so. It’s taken me days of constant uploading to get to that point. So it’s obviously more than just the uploader software. Still, the uploading is a problem.

Instant Mixes: These (“Instant mixes use a combination of metadata and audio analysis to create playlists that match the mood and style of your selection”) work about as well as the Genius playlists in iTunes, which is to say that they’re basically functional, but their music grouping is pretty substantially flawed. I created a playlist based on Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”, and it threw in a live version of Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard It Through The Grapvine”, but didn’t include Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova”. It seems more like these are just random or based on BPM rather than similar styles of music. It would make more sense just to stick with shuffle play.

Thumbs up/down: There’s been a lot of study that shows that like/dislike options work better than five star ratings, but that’s just for giving feedback. I’m a huge fan of the five star ratings within iTunes as it lets me get much greater control over my playlists, and thumbs up/down isn’t nearly as useful for me. Thumbs down.

Library management. Not great. I’m sure that the ability to view your library as a list or as album covers is coming, but at the moment, you either find an artist or song by doing a lot of scrolling or doing a search, neither of which is ideal. 

Other features I’d like to see:

• Different display options, like having a list view of album covers with the songs next to it
• Have a “recently played” auto mix
• Have a way to switch to the song/view currently playing, like iTunes’ ctrl-L
• Have a “date added” column in the view as well as a year column. Basic stuff that I sure hope is coming.
• Something like iTunes DJ: an ongoing, temporary playlist
• Have some sort of social aspect: add friends and see what they’re listening to and liking, a combo of last.fm and Lala’s old social ticker.

Anyone else out there have experiences with Google Music?

Every morning, when I fill in the hours on my work’s electronic timesheet, I’m struck by how odd it is that we’re still judging our work by the time spent on it.

It’s odd because it’s old-fashioned. In the paper and phone world, you could really only do work when you were at work. But we do work all the time now. I check my email when I first wake up. Does that mean I start my day at 6:30 am? Should that be reflected on my timesheet? How about when I respond to an email or check Basecamp when I’m on the bus? Does my work day start then? How about when I look at Google Analytics at night or think about email newsletters when I’m in the shower (which I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I did this morning)?

On the other side, if someone finishes the work that they’re meant to do, why should they feel like they need to stay at work until 5:00, just because that’s the official time of the work day? I don’t think anyone would argue that time spent at work on personal things isn’t something that should be part of your work hours, but why be more concerned when those personal things happen during “work hours”?

The ever-more connected world, where our work email comes in with our personal email and all the apps we use for work are available wherever we are, just strengthens the argument that work is about what you get done and not how long you spend doing it.

Here’s a bunch of poorly thought-out thoughts on it all:

A pretty good chunk of iCloud seems just like Mobile Me with a different name and a little cleaned up and optimized. But with the weird restrictions (photos are stored for 30 days?) and the 5 GB of space, I’m not really sure this is the service that’s going to move the average user to device independence and “change the way we use computers”.

The part I’m most interested in is the iTunes in the cloud, and their “one more thing” of iTunes Match. Basically, this service is what Lala did: recreates your library in the cloud. iTunes Match promises that if it will only have to upload your songs to the cloud if it can’t find it in the library of what they sell. But the iTunes cover finder tells me it can’t find album covers that I can see that they have in the store. Why should I think that they’ll be able to match music any better?

In other words, where Apple promises that your iCloud music will be synced in “minutes”, don’t believe it. It’s still going to take a pretty good long while, and those of us with 100 GB+ music libraries will still be waiting a long time.

We still haven’t seen much. Do playlists sync? Can you download some songs for offline access? I also wonder how this is going to work with ISPs and phone companies beginning to charge for larger uses of bandwidth. We’re constantly told that it’s only a select few people that go past the monthly limit, but when average people start streaming all their music at all times, won’t that start putting a whole lot more people past the limits? There may be a fight brewing here.

And this bugs me: “Users get 5 GB of storage for free”. As long as we’re still talking about 5 GB here and 2 GB there and “pay for 20 GB”, we won’t be living our lives fully in the cloud. iCloud is taking a step forward, but it’s a small one. This is an improvement in convenience for Apple users, but it’s really more of a necessary move rather than something that will get anyone getting anxious to switch to a Mac.