Category Archives: Blog

Amway "breaks" into music with Fanista

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When I heard around the Internet that Amway was using one of their corporations to break into the online music business, I thought it was a joke. In fact, it seems it is true. Amway is planning on “breaking into the online music business”.

Amway is knocking on the door of online music through a web site called Fanista. How is Fanista set up? Rather like a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme, it seems. Very Web 1.0.

Fanista sent out an email to potential beta testers recently. In this email Fanista made a weak sales pitch and tried to encourage people to join. Our source for finding out about Fanista was kind enough to post their copy of the email in full on their site, found here.

Here is an excerpt from the email that displays the MMM / pyramid structure:

“And we’re willing to reward you for your efforts if you’re interested. Through our unique “Common Interest Commerce,” or “CIC,” rewards program, users who become CIC members can earn up to two levels of commission: 5% of every purchase made by the friends they bring in, and, when their friends become CIC members, another 5% of every purchase made by the friends of their friends. Users can also earn insider perks and achieve social status for establishing themselves as tastemakers and “experts” when they share their voice and loves with the Fanista.com community at large. It’s our way of rewarding the people who help us build the community.”

I was hoping to explore this potential gold mine of humor myself, but have not yet received confirmation from my sign up to the private beta invite. That in itself is a problem, since I “accepted” my invite over a week ago. That kind of sluggishness doesn’t bode well for a start up breaking into a crowded field.

I’m not sure if their association with Amway will help or hinder them. I’m guessing it will hurt their chances of success. After all, how long has it been since you’ve trusted an Amway pitch?

Should I finally receive my confirmation of sign up this weekend, over a week out, I will come back and update this post with screen shots and a review of actual use of the site. Until then, suffice it to say that their sales pitch leaves much to be desired and smacks of Amway schemes past.

My original version found at Profy site.

Tunesquare Puts The Social In Indie Music

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Did you think there were so many social music networks popping up that there couldn’t possibly be anymore? Think again. Tunesquare has popped up to offer indie music flavor for the social music network scene.

With a hip look similar to that of Trig and MOG (dark background and rounded, edgy graphic edges, among other attributes), Tunesquare offers a way to find new music by category. They advertise that their site is for unsigned bands only, something that so far sets them apart as the emusic of the social music network scene.

The main search ability seems to be by category. They have mostly mainstream categories like Pop, Rock, Rap, Hip Hop, Singer/Songwriter and Heavy Metal. Non-mainstream genres like Punk, Emo and others seem to be lumped under the “Other” category. This is disappointing for a Punk Alt junkie like myself, but I am aware that we are in the minority, so don’t expect top billing.

In addition to the ability to browse by artist or genre, Tunesquare offers a forums section where artists and listeners can talk to each other, an events calendar where artists can list upcoming shows and self produced or independent label album drops, and other promotional events. When you sign up for Tunesquare, you sign up as either a listener or an artist.

Tunesquare offers artists the opportunity to generate money from their listing on Tunesquare. Listening to songs and downloading them is completely free for listeners. Artists make money from unobtrusive ads found on the site in various places. Tunesquare is able to use the ads to offset the cost of supporting new and unsigned music.

I’m not sure if an ad based music network is viable financially in the long run, but I like the general idea. Being exposed to great music I’d otherwise miss is worth a few ads in the mix, in my opinion. My worry is that the ads may become more and more obtrusive as the need to generate more money may arise to offset site costs.

I had more trouble finding fellow users that shared my musical taste than I did finding bands to listen to. The site is definitely geared toward showcasing the music and offering artists a pay model of exposure. Don’t get me wrong, the social aspect is there, it just isn’t as blatant as MySpace Music , Trig, iLike or MOG. The main way you see other user on the site is in the Forums and in the comments under the music itself.

I’d like Tunesquare more if it had a recommendation feature on the Profile page. I’d love to tell people what my favorites were and why without having to write yet another blog (Tunesaquare fives its users a free place to blog). I have enough blogs of my own already without adding another one to the mix. Plus, unlike MOG, Tunesquare’s blog form doesn’t allow for offsite linking or inline song play. This can save bandwidth, I’m sure, but it just isn’t as much fun.

I think I’ll be returning to Tunesquare fairly regularly – exposure to new music is worth a few ads, and I don’t really need another friend-soggy social network to keep up with. Between Tunesquare and emusic I think my unsigned band list on my iPod will stay complete and up to date.

My original version found at Profy site.

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NaBloPoMo and Ning used social media and web 2.0 to grow and change

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Part of what makes the Internet fun is the ability to band together with other people who share your interests in large scale group events. Since the advent of Web 2.0, that has become even easier. You may have heard of the seemingly crazy NaNoWriMo, where people sign on to write a novel in the month of November. In response to NaNoWriMo, one blogger decided to have a little fun and create NaBloPoMo – write a blog post a day for the month of November.

Fussy’s idea caught on like wildfire in the blogosphere, with bloggers everywhere forwarding her link to each other and using her comments section to sign on to the challenge. As NaBloPoMo grew and evolved, she added a page on her own blog to try and organize it better, provided prizes and participation buttons and made things more “official”. It still wasn’t convenient to sign on to participate, but participation continued to grow.

Enter Ning, a social networking site geared toward group causes like this one. With just a few mouse clicks, Fussy was able to use Web 2.0 to streamline her idea. This year she is already over 1500 participants and counting, all because she tapped into the power of Web 2.0 to grow her movement. You can see the NaBloPoMo Ning group here.

This is a real world example of the power of Web 2.0. By making applications that are simple, elegant and fun, more people are using the web in more ways. Fussy posted her Ning group less than a month ago, and that simple act quadrupled the number of people who wanted to participate in her idea. If the web can grow a basic idea like NaBloPoMo that fast, think of what it can do for your idea or favorite cause.

I was also pleased with the Ning interface. I had not yet heard of Ning when I got the heads up that Fussy had moved the NaBloPoMo logistics over there. It was extremely quick to set up a profile and be part of the group, and even quicker to customize the profile to look more like my personal blog (I will be participating in NaBloPoMo myself, of course. Feel free to add me as a friend there).

With Ning I can add pod casts, blog entries, notes, comments, videos and even music to my group profile page. I especially like the music feature – it lets people know what I like to listen to while I write, and they can play the songs themselves. It integrates with iTunes to import the file right onto the Ning server. The music importer is fast, too. I was impressed at the short amount of time it took to upload a long song like Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World”.

The whole Ning interface is simple to use, and easy to navigate to find new friends in your group. It’s like having your own MySpace orFaceBook that you design for your specific needs. I can see uses for Ning in the business world, in alumni associations, self help groups, reading groups, activity groups – the possibilities are endless. Plus, because they have limited the amount of customization you can do, you get a “personalized” page without clogging their band width, so the site stays fast.

My original version found at Profy site.

Social Music Charts for iLike and Billboard

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There have been many times when I wished the Billboard music charts reflected my taste in music more closely. That time may be now. Billboard and iLike have decided to collaborate on a social music chart. The potential for tracking what kind of music is really popular, as opposed to what kind is just overplayed, is huge.

At the moment this innovative new idea will only be available on the FaceBook platform. Social networking, social music, social music chart tracking – what more could you ask for? Billboard and iLike currently plan on offering the charts weekly to FaceBook users.

The weekly music chart is not the only aspect of this collaboration. Billboard and iLike also plan to track FaceBook users’ song dedications, profile song popularilty, what songs are most added on FaceBook, and more.

Of course, all of this real data comes at a price. Billboard will be piggybacking on the iLike desktop application installed on user computers to track what songs you have on your iTunes, Windows Media Player and other music applications. This information will be used to create another chart tracking the most popular music downloaded offline.

That Big Brother-esque application seems a little invasive. I’m not fond of programs that glean data from my hard drive, and tend not to install them, or uninstall them. However, once you have iLike turned on in FaceBook, you’ve been sharing your information there anyway, so in this case it may not be that big of a deal.

I’m excited to see if the 12 songs Clear Channel forces down listeners throats are really the most popular in their genres or not. I’m betting not. My guess is that if nothing else this collaboration will help display the true face of music listener preferences to the people who make the playlists on the radio.

My original version found at Profy site.

Pure Volume, Pure Vanilla

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In the social music site scene, Pure Volume stands out. It stands out for being nondescript, that is. With a white and grey on grey look, a logo that looks hidden and a plain vanilla interface, Pure Volume’s biggest trait is how vanilla it seems when compared to sites like Trig, Mog, Last.FM and iLike.

Where I see “vanilla”, others may see “streamlined”, however. The site is all about finding new artists in your area or in the genre you like. There are no loud bells and whistles, no distracting graphics, no garish designs. It is a simple search by artist location and genre to find new music. You can also search by listener to find people with similar taste in music as you.

Users of Pure Volume are sorted into Artists and Listeners. Once you sign up under the correct category, you can immediately begin searching the site for music or fellow music lovers – no mucking about with your profile beforehand required.

One thing I noticed about the site was that it seems to have some bandwidth issues. This happens sometimes as a site gets more popular, but one thing I expect when I see a site that is so plain in design is a fast load time and fast search time. It took several minutes to return my results on a simple search for Artists in my area.

Aside from load times, Pure Volume is also suffering from other issues. For example, I didn’t like that I couldn’t search “All States” for a punk band. I already know that living in the toolies means there aren’t many punk bands around, and I’d like to find music I like elsewhere, without having to manually enter each state, then search, then go back and search the next state.

They seem to have their eye on a goal, and part of that seems to be becoming known as a streamlined, efficient music site. In order for that to happen, they have some work to do on interface and bandwidth. I’ll be keeping an eye on them to see how they grow.

My original version found at Profy site.

Trig's Got Its Finger On The Trigger

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Recent addition to the social network scene is Trig, a social network that focuses entirely on music and music fans. It has a rock star design that grabs your eye right off the bat, and is filled with local talent. It’s gaining fans from across the Internet by giving talent a place to get discovered or to increase their audience, and giving music lovers a chance to find more music to love.

Trig is competing with other social networking music sites like MOG and PureVolume. It is closest in look and feel to MOG than to PureVolume. Trig has more unsigned music than MOG does right now, with MOG leading in the “bands you have actually heard of” department. Right now I’d recommend Trig for people looking to discover new music, and new music loving friends, and MOG for people who are looking for the signed bands they know and love.

Trig gives you a profile on sign up that you can customize, though happily not as much as MySpace. It lets you add your own avatar or photo, a quote, some basic biographical information, and choose a skin to alter the appearance of your Trig profile page.

You can browse Trig for fellow music lovers by using their Trig Public Timeline page, similar to Twitter ‘s public timeline feature. This lets you see the music files, videos, profiles and quotes people are posting in real time, and how each is rated according to the Trig society. You give music pages and music lover pages “Trigs” when you like them – the higher the number of Trigs, the higher your position in searches and on Trig pages.

You can browse bands and singers in a variety of ways on Trig. My favorite thing about Trig is that it includes the ability to browse by genre, location and other aspects of music, including what a band or singer sounds like. That’s fantastic when you are seeking new music to fall in love with.

All in all Trig delivers a nice package that includes accessible music and an easy to use format. It has the right edgy vibe and look, and is easy to navigate. It is in beta right now, but any user can send invites and sign up for the beta is open to all.

My original version found at Profy site

Nuts for Nutsie

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Nutsie is a unique little Web 2.0 application that allows you to take your iTunes to the next level. Listen to your iTunes playlist online or on your mobile phone – no need to have an iPhone! Not only can you listen to your own playlist you can share your playlist with friends. That’s right – the potential embarrassment of the “shuffle songs” selection isn’t just something that happens behind closed doors anymore. Now you can share it with your friends and family also.

Signing up for Nutsie was extremely fast and painless. It took less than two minutes from the moment I logged on to the Nutsie web site to the moment I received confirmation that my iTunes Library had uploaded into the Nutsie server. Downloading Nutsie to my phone to use the mobile version of the application was a little less painless.

After I received my confirmation from Nutsie, I clicked the link and was taken to my home page. There I saw my playlist, uploaded and ready to listen to. Nutsie only lists the songs in your playlists that it already has on its server. This means that more than half of my music was missing, as I like a rather esoteric blend of punk, alternative and other similar tunes. I wasn’t expecting them to have the punk songs I listen to, but I was surprised that some of the more mainstream songs were not there.

There was no lag time on the player at all when using it online. Nutsie also gives you the chance to view your list by CD instead of by song, and grabs the artwork that goes with the CD for you to browse visually. When you listen to the playlist it defaults to shuffle mode. You can switch to listening to each CD by switching views.

It took some finagling to download Nutsie to my phone, an F9200 by LG. Nutsie’s automated system sent the activation link to my phone immediately, but my phone had some trouble downloading the application. Once I got past its issues, the application loaded immediately, giving me access to my Nutsie iTunes playlist on the go.

I am enjoying Nutsie, but with an iPod already I’m not sure how often I’ll use the mobile phone application. Not only that, I’m already involved in so many other social music sites like MOG making room to actively participate in one more that offers fewer features seems redundant. As far as I can tell, Nutsie’s sole purpose is to listen to your own playlist and share it with a few people you already know. There is no way to make new friends with similar musical tastes that I could find, or to expand the application in any other way.

Nutsie gets a semi-positive reaction from me. It’s a cute, attractively designed, easy to use applicaton that gives you access to youriTunes library in a new way. It lets you share it with your friends, but has limits that keep it from going to the next level. I’ll keep it on my MacBook, but I don’t think it will see daily use.

My original version found at Profy site.

MOG or Last.FM

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There are a vast array of music social networks out there to choose from. The three heavy hitters in the social music site scene right now seem to be iLike, Last.FM and MOG. I didn’t include iLike in this comparison, because it lacks some of the features that MOG and Last.FM offer and seems to be most useful on existing social networking sites like Facebook.

Last.FM got my attention first. I installed the small widget that “talks” to the Last.FM site (called scrobbling by Last.FM). At first, all went well, and it always updated my music based on what songs I was playing and downloading. It had recommendations for me whenever I visited the web site, and I could customize my profile and seek out other people with the same music tastes. I was loving it.

That’s when it started having issues. I first noticed the issues on the MySpace widget I had installed – 9 times out of 10 the widget wasn’t working. So I checked the sidebar widget I had on one of my logs. Same thing. I made sure the program on my computer was working (it was), and decided to monitor it for a few days. Over the course of several days, the Last.FM widget was down about 80% of the time. Since displaying what I was listening to was the main reason I’d installed Last.FM, and the feature I was most interested in using, I decided to try a new program.

I went to MOG and grabbed their version of Last.FM’s “scrobbler” program. Both were equally simple to install – just double click the icon on the desktop and it places the little widget right into your System Preferences dashboard (I have a MacBook). As it installs it asks you to allow it access to your iTunes, and you are done. Both programs installed the same way.

Right away, I liked MOG better than Last.FM. Last.FM caused some lag time on my system (perhaps it is a larger program – I don’t know the reason) where MOG had no impact on my system at all. It runs quietly in the background, interfering with nothing. I had spent some time on Last.FM’s web site, but never really got into the social aspects of it. Finding friends on Last.FM simply wasn’t as intuitive to me, although overall their design is more attractive than MOG.

On MOG’s site, however; I find that I play all the time. I love the way they have set up the user pages to place everything from blog ability to song uploads and sharing right at your fingertips. I find myself playing around there quite a bit more than is wise considering all the work I have to do on a daily basis. In fact, the blog feature of MOG is one of the things I like best about it. Sure, I already have several blogs of my own, but none are dedicated to music. With MOG I can write about and share what I’m listening to. It even allows you to embed the shared music on your other blogs, and link to pages where users can buy the albums that go with the tracks – genius!

As far as the widgets on my Myspace , FaceBook and blog sidebars , they have been up and running 9 times out of ten. The few times they have been down, MOG has placed an automatically generated error message that states the server is being maintained, so your readers don’t see blank space or get the eternally spinning wheel or hourglass. One drawback of MOG is load time on the widgets. MOG does not cause my computer to drag, but it does occasionally cause the sidebar widget to drag. I can only assume that happens in times of server overload. It would be nice if MOG offered a way to have the widget default to the server maintenance message if their widget takes longer than a minute to load.

Overall, I liked the features and reliability better with MOG than with Last.FM. If you don’t need the blog, or like the design better at Last.FM, you may make a different choice. Not only that, new social music sites arrive often in Web 2.0 land, so you could find a program you like better than either of them. That’s the beauty of Web 2.0 for creatives – options.

My original version found at Profy site

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NovelMaker Social Networking for the Literary Set

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NovelMaker is a social network for the literary set. It was brought to my attention in response to an article I wrote about Lazy Library. In the same comment section, the owner of NovelMaker promised a site design revamp soon, although that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. That means I am writing this review based on their original design, not the promised revamp.

NovelMaker is competing in an already crowded field. There are a number of sites already using Web 2.0 concepts to bring social networking, critique and publishing to the literary masses. The most well known of these competitors is EditRed. I’ve been a member of EditRed and other social writing sites like it for a long time, so I was excited to hear there was another option available. It’s hard to get your writing out there for the world to see, and hard to get honest criticism. For that reason I take a “the more the merrier” approach to new options.

Unfortunately, NovelMaker lost a few points right away for the current site design. It does not have a stand out design, and is not easy to navigate. Those are two essentials to a successful Web 2.0 venture: simple, elegant design and ease of use. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that NovelMaker is hard to use, it is just that it isn’t as intuitive and well organized as some of the sites I’ve been using. Since they mentioned a redesign in the works, I’ll hope that fixing these two things are high on the list.

My other issue with the site is speed. It takes a long time for the pages to load. In this day of instant gratification, that is a huge blow to a site’s success. If I click on “Read Top Authors”, I want to go right to that page, not stare at a spinning beach ball or hourglass for a few minutes. To make sure the problem didn’t lie with me, I tried NovelMaker on FireFox, Camino and Safari on my high speed cable Internet connection and had the same problem with load times on all three.

NovelMaker offers a variety of options for posting your own work. You can set it to private or public, similar to other author networks out there. If you set it to public, you will be able to receive critiques, ratings and comments from other users of the site. Users of the site include people from both the publishing and editing side and the writing side of things.

Unfortunately, figuring out how to upload your work is not as easy to do on NovelMaker as it is on my favorite writing Web 2.0 site, EditRed. They seem to have one all purpose form for uploading everything from poems to novels – “Upload Book”. Clicking that takes you to a screen where you have blocks to enter information under the “Upload Manuscript” heading. The difference in titles may confuse some people, who might think they were taken to the wrong page.

Another drawback is that although they have text boxes for the synopsis, title and other aspects of the upload, they only offer a file upload option for the manuscript, book, poem, etc itself. They accept PDF and Word files, which is fine if you have either program or know how to save a text file as a doc file, but what if you don’t? Adding a text box for the actual manuscript submission would be a huge plus.

I was also not fond of the way results are displayed. When I search for authors to read, I only want to see the ones that chose “public” as an option. Instead NovelMaker displays them all, whether you can “see” their work or not. This may be another thing that gets remedied in the site redesign, but for now it is an issue. They also offer to help you self publish your work, a feature that has become standard in online writing communities.

In the end, I think NovelMaker has potential, but it needs to work out its kinks to really compete. There is plenty of room in the Web 2.0 world for another literary social network. NovelMaker just needs to hone its site interface and design and make it competitive with the sites that have been out there longer. It must be sleeker, more intuitive, easier to use and faster to be a true success. I hope the site owners stop by and let us know when they have finished the redesign so I can go back and take a look.

My original version found at Profy site

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Visual Internet Search With oSkope

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oSkope Visual Search is an innovative way to “see” the internet. They have tapped into the market of people who think about the world differently and don’t want to conduct traditional linguistic searches. With oSkope, you can search Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube with the ease of looking at pretty pictures and dragging your mouse.

Two areas that oSkope could spend more time developing are it’s appearance and the services it searches. I’d like to be able to search the entire web this way, not just four predetermined sites. I understand they are a new application and are working out some kinks, but a wider search net would be ideal. Also, their appearance falls short of the now-traditional Web 2.0 “look”. It nailed the simplicity of Web 2.0, but lost points on the drab monochrome color scheme. I found my eyes feeling tired after just a few minutes on the site.

oSkope offers a free registration, which gives you a folder of your own to store your images in. This folder is ever-present at the bottom of your screen. To place images and their associated links in your folder, just drag and drop. You can even rearrange the order of your search results by the same simple drag and drop method. In fact – the entire site is a tabbed, drag and drop or a pull down menu interface with little room for user error.

The site has a nice introductory video demonstrating their services. I was unable to capture their nice, clean version for you, but I did find it on YouTube (using their site to search for it, natch). As you can see in the video, there are a variety of ways to sort your results – in grids, lines or by popularity, among other things. At first, the site feels somewhat awkward to use, as it is so different than normal search methods. As you surf the site, however, it gets more and more intuitive, until you are finding, sorting and grabbing visual search results like a pro. As you find results you can use, hovering over the image gives you a brief description of the item, and clicking takes you to it.

One last thing was lacking from the site – a social network. Having the social aspect would take it to the next level. Imagine being able to show friends what you were searching for as you searched? That would make oSkope not only useful, but incredibly cool. As it stands oSkope is still useful, and now has a home in my bookmarks bar. I plan to keep an eye on this young Web 2.0 app and see if they tap into the full potential of this idea in later releases.

My original version found at Profy site

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