This week is Android week. I could blog in depth about it, but then that’s what everyone else is doing. I’d rather sit back and see where it goes. Google’s most compelling product and technology is search. I don’t see a ‘mobile search’ paradigm shift with Android - not yet anyway. One is surely coming, and that will be much more worthy of our attention. Google - and definitely HTC - don’t have the consumer device savvy and sex appeal that Apple bring with their iTunes/iPod pleasure-fest. Nor do they have the refined consumer-savvy genius of the Mac OS X heritage. Linux under the hood isn’t interesting - in any device or platform. Cocoa is though.
Google’s potential lies in the network. I want my digital life to be more efficient, more time-saving, more effective than it is today. This certainly means taking mobile access into account, if not making it the main arc of my digital life story. Where’s the Google version of Mobile Me? That will get my juices flowing.
Doing stuff in the network must increasingly take meta-data into account. We all know this. I recently tried both iLike and iTune’s Genius service. Both are aimed at suggesting products that I might like to buy based on what I already own. They use meta-data to do this and ’social network’ power.
I have been fascinated by recommendation for some time. I remember my first experience of news groups before the web and my reaction to it. I could find groups of people with similar music tastes to my own and talk with them - something that I couldn’t do before, other than by joining fan clubs. This was exciting because I got to hang out with people who knew more than I did about the types of music I liked. I learned new stuff. I got recommendations. I gave recommendations. I was empowered by the network.
I have tried various recommendation services, but I am always left feeling underwhelmed by the experience. Apart from the higher chances of bumping into new content from artists I already know, I’m not sure that I’m doing any better with new content discovery than simply navigating ‘intelligently’ around the iTunes (or Amazon) store in the first place.
Genius is good for kicking off new playlists. I think they have solved a real problem here. It would be even better if the playlist would adapt to my ’skipping’ of tracks, moving these lower down the list next time around. No doubt, Genius ought to increase music sales simply by virtue of the ‘bump into effect’ when we see it in action in the iTunes window.
What I find with a lot of recommendation ‘engines’ is that they don’t really work. I think that the problem is that the long tail is its own worst enemy when it comes to recommendation because the filtering is too wide.
The fact that we can now so easily access the long tail of digital content must surely have affected our music tastes and catalogues, broadening them considerably. I think there is evidence of this in the recommendations. In the old days, when we went out and bought vinyl, it seemed more common to be into one thing, like ‘Punk’, ‘Goth’, ‘Metal’ and others I don’t really remember all that well.
I wonder if we even have such groups these days. It seems common for consumers to just go with whatever they like because it’s so easy to find and download new content, especially one track at a time. We are broadband consumers in every sense.
Of course, I might be getting confused by my maturing tastes. These days I listen to just about anything that I find interesting, ranging across a vast span of genres, except Chinese opera. Even the Olympics opening ceremony didn’t change my mind on that one 
The single most influential piece of technology on my musical tastes has been the incredible Shazam music service - still my favourite mobile app ever. And I mean that! Sure, I use mobile email more than any other service, but that’s just email gone mobile. Shazam is only possible because of mobile and it’s completely personal, portable and insanely infectious. It works even better on the iPhone, which is great news.
There is a lot more they could do with this service to make it even more exciting. There’s great potential to combine this technology and ‘discovery experience’ with social networks built around music identification, which is perhaps what Shazam are trying to do with their Facebook app. However, I don’t want to hang around in Facebook to get music insights - I’d prefer to see them on my mobile, especially my iPhone.
