Silly Wampa

I’ve been trying out both of these music services. These are both examples of how interactive radio is starting to bloom. Both operate under a similar premise. You type in the name of a band or artist you like, they find that artist and others just like them. For example, one of my favorite bands is the Descendents. On both services I searched for them and found them plus other bands like Black Flag, Pennywise, Less than Jake, etc. A whole bunch of punk and ska bands. Both services let you skip songs you don’t like which is a huge plus. You can also tag songs you do like so the service can try to match your preferences.

The services vary in how they get the music to you. For Last.fm I downloaded their player, logged in and started looking for bands. I like the standalone player idea. It will even let you use Winamp or another medai player, but it still has to launch to connect to the service. I just wish it would minimize to the system tray like winamp does.

Pandora is a web based service. Flash is required, and I’m not sure, but I think java is too. I don’t like the fact that if you skip too many songs within an hour, you can’t skip anymore. I think I skipped 10 songs in a row and then got a message telling me that due to their license agreement, they can’t let me skip anymore songs this hour. That’s a load of shit.

So, I don’t have any real conclusions or recommendations, just observations. I’d say I probably prefer last.fm so far though.

I originally posted this in January, 2006 on another blog.

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I came across this site this week, BubbleShare. It’s yet another photo-sharing web site. I learned about it thanks to an article on Ajaxian. It’s got a lot of DHTML and AJAX so it’s generating a lot of buzz from that. It’s a very simple site. No real customization options available. The site is in Beta, but if they really want to get people to stick around and distinguish themselves amongst all the other sites, they need to add the ability to create themes and change colors and layouts.

One other thing I dont like. There’s no user authentication. They email you a link that is to your administration area. In one way it might be nice to not have to worry about having yet ANOTHER user/pass to remember, but it doesnt seem that secure without a user/pass authentication.

One plus for this site, it works in Firefox. Some sites give you an activex control to upload photos that only works in IE. this site does that but if you’re not in IE, you can still use it.

I also like that it has a community as well. sharing photos is nice, but sites get more sticky traffic if they have a community.

here’s my album with 5 pics in it. I like the slider for resizing thumbnails. its all Javascript, no activex controls.