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Audioscrobbler (Anyone Remember Firefly?)
asciirock writes "RJ, a University of Southampton grad student in the UK has just put his final year project online. Audioscrobbler is a free plug-in for Linux XMMS and Windows Winamp2. It tracks every tune you play, cross-references with others in the Audioscrobbler community and serves up recommendations. There's also msging, stats and user homepages. In other words... Firefly lives!"
Listen to *one* Britney Spears track out of curiosity, get distracted by something to do in another room, forget that it's playing repeatedly for 3 hours in the meanwhile, get labelled a teen music sheep by the system and get recommendations for more degrading music. Arg!
Recommendations are nice, but what I want is a tie in to Fast Track. I want a list of DATs that I can plug in to Kazaalite and download based on what I play.
There is no real reason why that would be a feedback loop:
You're listening to a set A of songs. So, you recieve a reccomendation from someone listening partly to A, partly to another set (all the songs he heard which are not in A), B.
You exercise your own taste (which is not included in your text at all), and integrate part of B. (You might also give up a few over-played songs of A)
Now you have new recommendations...
There's absolutely no reason why this should gravitate towards the MTV play list: it'll gravitate towards "music you like and music people who like that, likes"
I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation.
A person recieves a recommendation, and may choose to take it or not. He may listen to part of the song, decide to remove it, and the program will disregard that song.
You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do...
My other
What I really don't get, and sounds a bit fishy to me, is the whole username/profiling thing.
I mean, this can be done without it:
Have an anonymous user handle on that site. No email, no nothing. (sure, they can have your IP. They can have mine, too, if they want, it's a dynamic one)
Whenever you hear a song, it sends the info: a user who heard (set of songs) decided to hear (new song), and of course heuristics of how much any song is heard, bla bla bla.
The server keeps this huge database. When you want recommendations (downloaded every 15 min? or something) your program asks what the database recommends for someone who listened to (the set of songs you listened to). You're not giving away an email, no personal info, just an anonymous username (created automatically, or something. There is alot of 'or something's here)
There's no real reason for the server to know who you are or what you like for this to work.
Perfect profiling is also not nessecary, in my view, but that's a different issue altogether
My other
I think that associations, in computing, is a great idea for user interface.
A program like this (lets disregard the Big Brother for one second, and look at computer+user alone) tells you what songs it thinks you'll like, based on what you've heard before.
It could also tell you what songs you'd like to hear NEXT, based on order of songs you had before, and make these easier to access on the playlist (like, on the recommendation list. I'm getting out of hand aren't I?)
The whole idea of associating user actions can be great. Suppose you work on a project. Slowly, the computer (the brand-new GPLed Associator program) associates a certain directory, where all the files are, with the files themselves, your favorite editor, the compiler for that language, and certain sites you visited researching for it.
via some UI, it'll make all these accessible when 'triggered' - when it is pretty sure you're working on the project right now, or going to.
In some sense (in a small amount of cases), the computer will be 'one step ahead of you' - holding the line when you're just about to ask it to call...
My other
Don't worry, they won't. The RIAA has no power in the UK and none over the government.
Part of the fun of being British these days is the RIAA can't bribe - sorry, fund - polititions in Westminister nearly as easily as in Washington.
This is my sig.
Why not today?
Don't be embarrassed about it being crappy code, all code is crappy in the early stages. :) Put the GPL LICENSE file in the root directory, and follow its directions for adding notification to your source files. Then tar it up and call it 0.01.
Put it up and keep putting it up as you update it. If you think you might have security issues, best that you open the code now before your user base gets any bigger -- let people review it and send you suggestions. If you don't think you have security issues, you have no reason not to release it.
For a project that demands community participation, a promise of GPL code in the future is worthless. What's valuable is the code itself.
Licenses, releases, security feedback, other feedback... this is all part of doing a project like this. It's something that isn't normally taught in a university, but if you really want to run a project that depends on its community, this is not extra-credit, this is a prerequisite.
Just my opinion :)