I'm building my presence of a range of the social networking sites connected with music and entertainment. Some of them I've been on for over two years; some of them I've been on for a matter of days. So far you can find me on (the links go direct to my profile):
- GarageBand
- iLike
- Last.fm
- MOG
- MySpace
- MyStrands
- Vox
- Goombah (no web-based profiles, but if you have the client download, my member name is DJAlchemi).
If you are a member of any of these, please make contact with me via the links above, so we can make 'friends'. Frankly I need some more friends to make life more interesting.
Though technically many of these services have overlapping features, they all feel quite different. We all know that the currency of MySpace friends is pretty devalued, but at least it means that it's easy to approach people and 'add' them as friends. In other spaces people seem more likely to stay mostly in their own lockers. On MyStrands, for example, I've posted a few journal entries. The most views any of these posts has had is eleven (at the time of writing); comments are rare; and most members seem to have fewer than five friends.
MOG's manifesto throws down a challenge to the services that provide automated recommendations, declaring "Living, breathing human beings that you've come to trust are the best way to get turned on to new music." So it's not surprising that they put more emphasis on community. I think the first few comments I got on posts I made there were from MOG staff. Which is fine: making people feel welcome person-to-person is important and valuable to increase involvement. (In the current draft of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book, I have a fictional scenario involving a community manager whose job involves exactly such facilitation.)
The online spaces where I've made genuine friends — people I meet for a drink and invite round for a meal — are not the fully-featured platforms where you can poke around in the draws of other people's collections to judge your compatibility, but in old-fashioned email lists where people just natter, and argue, and get sarcastic with each other. Perhaps that's just because I've been on those email lists for years and years and years, but we'll see…
Meanwhile, it's also possible to string several of these services together in 'series' and in 'parallel'. This afternoon I had Goombah feeding some automated recommendations into my iTunes player, which, in turn, was sending data to my profiles on Last.fm, MOG, iLike and MusicStrands. These services will then use this data to generate more recommendations for me. To improve the validity of these recommendations, I really need to tag the data to indicate that I'm not listening to this music because I like it, but because some other algorithm pushed it at me. (For the avoidance of doubt, no, that last sentence is not meant seriously: I hope it helps register the ridiculousness of a 'perfect' recommendation system.)
This list of social music networks is not comprehensive. If you know of others, please let me know. I haven't included playlist sharing services like FIQL and Upto11.net, where I've also been active in the past.
Paul Lamere is proposing a collaborative effort to collate a list of all the new generation of music services, so please also pitch in to this if you can. I will be.
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