My (music) web 2.0 world
I have been a heavy user (of the web!) for around 7 or 8 years, & have been working in the web development industry for around 4. I have been running along with all the excitement & buzz of ‘Web 2.0′ for the last few years, & have enjoyed watching the web industry mature & turn into a seriously fun and exciting place to live, work, learn & play. However, some of the more amazing web technologies & applications to come out over the last year or so, although incredibly exciting &clever, have often felt like cool ideas that don’t really spread out. Sure, lots of applications work together, but often in a 2-way back & forth relationship.
For example, the more successful & relatively mature sites like delicious, facebook, flickr, last.fm, etc have been built upon by keen developers & companies, with incredible apps appearing all over the place, allowing users to share their photos on their blogs from Flickr, show their YouTube videos on Facebook, display their music tastes on their MySpace pages. Companies have built successful tools around these applications too, such as Moo or Blurb (Flickr).
It wasn’t until this week, however, that the whole nature of the web & the inter-connectivity of systems & applications on a personal level really hit home. I am not saying that there aren’t other applications or scenarios where lots of websites and tools work together in this way, but this is the first time that one action by me in one location, had the most incredible domino effect across my world wide web:-
I started off by listening to a track (for free) in the incredible desktop music player, Spotify. The track was immediately scrobbled via my last.fm desktop application to my user profile on last.fm:
As I chose to ‘love‘ the track playing via Spotify in my last.fm desktop application, my last.fm account knew it had to tweet the track to my Twitter account via lastfmlovetweet:
At the same time, last.fm was sending the data of the track I was listening to in my profile to an RSS feed on our work website, which displays tracks played recently by all members of the 21st team in the sidebar:
Now, back to Twitter again. My Twitter account is set up to send an update to both my facebook profile status, and to my blog header:
And that completes the amazing linkage that took place with me listening and loving one track from my desktop. Congratulations internet, I think we are getting there!
January 24th, 2009 at 11:18 am
It might be happening more often than you are able to become aware. What’s interesting is seeing the kind of labels you are using and then watching how others are responding to.
What on one hand appears as your world wide loops may very well be a shared language that dips in and out of your network.
At least you are hearing some fab tunes while it’s happening.
January 25th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
And those are just the linkages you (and 21st) have set up, what about everyone else’s? What about people who subscribe to your friend feed? Or the band’s bot who listens to Twitter for a mention of their name and then autofollows you? Or the record label who serves adverts for the band to your friends on Facebook, because it now knows you like them and therefore they might too?
January 25th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
My goodness me – it’s out of control!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!