Growin’ Up (Springsteen cover) - Portastatic
Damn I had this open in another window and wasn’t expecting the wallop of this song. Unexpected Springsteen will always, always do that. More to the point, I came to this song via fredwilson.fm, which I’ve seen in a few of his A VC emails. I finally gave it a whirl tonight after seeing his assessment of Ping:
In summary, Ping is not very social and it is not really about music. It is about music purchases and celebrities.
If you want to see a social network about music, check out last.fm. It knows what I am listening to right now no matter where I am listening (not in iTunes hopefully). It knows what music I like and it doesn’t ask me to tell them what that is. It knows who likes the same kind of music I do.
Ping shows what a command and control culture thinks a social network is. I am sure millions of people will use Ping. And I am equally sure that it will not advance the state of the music business one bit.
Weirdly, that reminded me of Twitter. I was recently annoyed to discover that my malfunctioning Tweetdeck was not the result of an overworked computer (my default assumption always) but rather Twitter deciding to kill some of its darlings. Or rather, some of your darlings - apps that users have become used to, that they have integrated into their behavior. I get why that has to happen - should happen, and is natural to happen, even - but I’m keeping my eye on how it’s happening.
It happened imperiously, top-down-ly, dare I say Facebook-ly. Sending out an email that your filter couldn’t distinguish from follower and DM notifications, instructing you to update your applications without so much as a prompt (they just…won’t work) and doing it during the last week of August - when people have tons of time to dedicate to their malfunctioning technology - all that doesn’t exactly maximize the user experience.
And Twitter is all about user experience - the fact that it is so easy, so clean, so unencumbered has won it so many users and fans, for so many different reasons. So when it starts to become annoying - with too many ads in the feed, too cluttered an interface, too many fail whales etc. - the less committed amongst us will bolt. I wrote about that in November when those lists were launched. I called it a “time-consuming, burdensome process [for] users,” rolled out in such a way as to create an urgency about making lists now lest you be left off the gravy train. (Not to be confused with the “Suggested Users” gravy train which was also more about brands and celebrities than anything else.) And it’s new “Suggested Follow” user confuses me because, unlike last.fm, it does seem to know “what I am listening to right now,” since it keeps suggesting people I already follow. There doesn’t seem to be much “listening” going on at all.
So that phrase - “a command and control culture” - doesn’t only sound like Apple, with its beautiful but un-openable iPad, but also Facebook with its top-down maze of privacy settings, and now Twitter with its weirdo Orwellian OAuth lingo (like something that might one day, say, enslave drones like these). The jury’s out on whether Twitter’s reassertion of control is better for users - I can’t help but agree with the note of caution sounded by Chris Dixon - but the more they behave like ”a command and control culture” the less they will ”advance the state [of the] business.” In the words of Cory Doctorow: “Incumbents made bad revolutionaries.”
I was halfway through writing this post when I remembered that Fred Wilson was not only the evangelizer of the free-and-social last.fm but was also the dude who brought forth Twitter’s app-killing message. Hm. Maybe that will mean he’s aware of the pitfalls, and will keep an eye on Twitter lest it become more like Ping than Last.fm. Change the Radio! Har har.
