Archive for December, 2005
Pandora vs. Last.fm
I may have already mentioned Last.fm, a neat web service offering streaming radio tailored to your musical tastes, and this week I discovered Pandora and have been digging it as well.
Both offer the following:
- 128kbps audio stream
- Allows user to rate each song played as positive or negative, which contributes to the accuracy of the music selection
- Can skip a limited number of songs per hour; cannot rewind or fast-forward
- Displays album art for each song
- Similar user interface
- Free (with a subscription version that has some extra features)
Yet have some important differences:
| Last.fm | Pandora |
|---|---|
| Ties into iTunes and other desktop media players to track and chart your listening habits | Self-contained; no ties to other applications |
| Compares your listening habits to other users’ to find similar music | Compares your song ratings to analyst-assigned musical attributes to find musically-similar music |
| Web site compiles personal and community-wide music charts and provides social networking features and groups | No social networking features |
| Player is a desktop application; requires download (available for Windows and Mac OS X) | Player is web-based; no download needed |
| No links to purchase music | Provides links to purchase music on Amazon or iTunes |
I
enjoy the tracking and networking features offered by Last.fm, though
more as a novelty than anything particularly useful. And while Last.fm
relies upon other users’ individual tastes to drive its selection
engine, I find Pandora’s use of the Music Genome Project
can produce some interesting and genre-crossing results that, while
musically accurate, users are unlikely to create because of marketing
perceptions (for example, Madonna’s track “Bedtime Story”, on its own,
fits in remarkably well with Depeche Mode material). Also, as Pandora
is a more objective service, it can produce more accurate results for
music that is not as popular among the type of people likely to sign up
for such Internet services, such as jazz or big band.
Google Reader
Aha, here is the web-based RSS newsreader I’ve been looking for, from our good friends at Google. After 10 minutes of playing, I think it’ll do the job quite nicely.
I tried Pluck
and didn’t like it because it doesn’t keep track of what you’ve read so
it can’t tell you what’s new–you have to manually step through each of
your subscriptions and remember what you’ve read and what you haven’t.
Gmail Web Clips
Gmail has introduced a new feature they call “Web Clips“, which promises to bring RSS feeds to your Gmail inbox.
At
first I was really excited about this. I’ve been using an RSS
newsreader application for a while now, and it’s quite handy, yet I am
frustrated by the fact that my subscriptions are stored only on the
local computer since I alternate between three different computers
throughout the day. I’ve been waiting for a free web-based newsreader,
and combining it with the clean interface of my beloved Gmail seemed a
fantastic idea.
But it’s not really a newsreader. Sure, you can
add your own subscriptions, but you can only view one news item at a
time, and only its headline, and it’s randomly selected from all of
your subscriptions. Moreover, Google reserves the right to populate
sponsored headlines of their choice. The net result is basically a text
ad appearing at the top of your inbox. Granted, you have considerable
control over what might appear there, but not total control, rendering
it useless for most practical purposes, and it’s slightly reminiscent
of the cluttered interfaces of most other web services.
I’m going to leave it enabled for a while. We’ll see.
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