Month: June 2012

Yesterday TheNextWeb reported that Facebook is rolling out a new “Share Music” button to your status update box which, when clicked, would allow you to share any song you like to your friends.

So how exactly will this work? My hope was that it would be akin to Tomahawk, i.e. if a friend shares a track, the song would play via whatever services you are subscribed to. That approach is complex though; Tomahawk works in that regard because it is a desktop client, into which you have “declared” which music services you use. Facebook does not have that luxury; it is an entirely browser-led experience.

Continue reading “With Teeth: Investigating Facebook’s new “share music” feature” →

For the last few weeks I’ve been using Rdio and of late something has become clear: I am now using it far, far more than Spotify, to which I am also a Premium Subscriber. Why? Because as a user experience, it is superior. Using it is a pleasure – one far more conducive to enjoying and discovering music as a true music fan.

The Rdio/Spotify comparison – to my mind anyway – serves as a study in simplicity versus bloat. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is about carefully studied user experience versus a “launch it now, fix it later” approach.

It feels trite to say that in some respects Spotify reminds me of MySpace, but allow me to expand on this. MySpace started going wrong when it felt like their service was not able to cope with the ways in which it was evolving. Features started to look bolted-on, sitting poorly within the interface and leaving users feeling like they were navigating a confused, poorly-designed site.

Spotify mirrors this in many respects. The social integration is poorly implemented and the way in which the new apps run feels not so much “how can this build upon what we have to truly enhance user experience?” as “how can we shoehorn this into the existing setup?”.

Continue reading “With Teeth: Rdio, Spotify and the perils of user experience” →