Thinking ‘Out of The (Pandora’s) Box’

Grooveshark is essentially a web-based audio-focused media player, with a library of music that is comprised of .mp3’s uploaded by Grooveshark’s userbase. In effect, grooveshark has almost every song you can think of, whether popular, obscure, new, or old. Each song is offered for sale by linking to the song on Amazon MP3 and/or iTunes.

Artists

Radio

Very Important Person

As a Grooveshark VIP, a user has access to the desktop application, and the mobile application. The desktop application lets you use grooveshark without needing to keep your browser open, and the mobile application can be installed on Andriod and Blackberry phones (some exceptions) and brings all the features of Grooveshark to your palm. Grooveshark also recently released an iPhone application, but this application is only available to those with a jail-broken iPhone.

Whenever Grooveshark is working on a feature VIP users get to use it first. My favorite VIP feature is a button that lets you pick a genre of music to listen to, and Grooveshark Radio will play music that falls into that genre.

Grooveshark’s Themes also open up to a VIP user. Where as unpaid users have a selection of three or four themes, VIP users have free reign over the entire selection.

When Grooveshark is used as a free service, the right hand side of your screen is taken up by rotating banner ads. As a VIP member, these ads are no more.

Need clarification? Have a Question? Log in with Facebook or Twitter and comment below. Tell me what YOU think of Grooveshark, or if you use something else, something better?

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Something I Liked

About a week ago I started receiving some rather curious device updates from twitter. That day I had been suffering from my springtime allergies and couldn’t understand why-it was the middle of January! Miserable, I complained to Twitter. Later on, my phone buzzed and I was presented with a text that was the following tweet from my friend Jaculynn

I had been tested for allergies twice in my life, but I’m actually not certain if either time mold or fungus was tested for. I snapped my phone shut, returning it to my pocket, and gave this possibility due consideration. Even though I was pretty sure of both that I wasn’t allergic to Mold or Fungus, and that had discovered the culprit already. (The weather had been uncharacteristically warm recently, and the trees had been tricked into blooming.)

A moment latter a thought me double checking that text, suspecting I had mis-read what it said. While it seemed like the kind of thing Jaculynn would say – I hadn’t elected to get device updates from her. Sure enough, it was Jaculyn that the tweet had come from. Now THIS is when I got excited.

Something Just Right

I had always wanted to get device updates for @Mentions. Since the early days of my Twitter use, I wondered why in the world such an option wasn’t available. Once a friend of mine (we’ll call him Kenan) tweeted something that both myself and another of his friends (we’ll call him Jordon) responded to.

The difference between myself and Jordon is that Kenan had elected to get device updates for Jordon a long time ago, whereas I had only met Kenan (as well as Jordon) recently, and so Kenan didn’t get device updates for my tweets. Kenan and Jordon then continued to converse – while I watched – and my reply was ignored, because Kenan didn’t know about it.

This is of course only one example, similar situations have many time occurred in different context. It wasn’t only for the sake of not leaving people out that wanted an option to get an SMS for every @Mention that was tweeted. I also had the personal desire to be able to answer every tweet more or less the moment it came my way. When people had something to say to or about me it was important to me, and I wanted to make sure they knew that by getting a timely reply.

Once, I worked up an alternative, but it didn’t work out so well.  I created an account at Notify.Me and had it send me SMS notifications for every new item on the  RSS feed I created using Twitter Search of tweets containing “@JyoNah.” The problem with that was that an essential bit of information was missing from those notifications; they didn’t include the name or twitter handle of the tweeter. Effectively, it didn’t work, and I was left hoping that Twitter would answer my prayers.

Something Gone Wrong

Just a few short days – if not a few short hours (I didn’t exactly keep track of it) after the device update from Jaculynn, my new favorite thing about SMS updates was no longer happening. Tweet after Tweet, people where including “@JyoNah” – but my phone didn’t buzz. I was disappointed – but not devastated, and after a short bit I moved on with my life.

It was a few days later that I encountered this update on status.twitter.com

It turned out that my favorite new feature wasn’t in fact, a bug. All I could think of – beside my amazed amusement - was to question WHY they had not implemented this as a feature yet. How has someone at Twitter not seen the benefit?

Shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t you find such a feature useful?

If you think @Mention device updates are a good idea;

use the hash-tag#BringBackTheBug or Copy the following and tweet it:

I think @twitter should #BringBackTheBug. Give us @Mention SMS updates. http://bit.ly/8RUuUA

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Facebook can be an INCREDIBLY useful social utility, but for all its potential it can be hard to figure out. Fortunately, there are little things you can do to help make the chaos a lot easier to manage.

Don’t Want to Go

The Facebook Events application is great. Its a nice, easy way to let all your friends know about an event you’d like them to come to, and if you’re feeling like the whole world might as well attend, all your friends have to do is invite all of THEIR friends and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, when you want to share an event, its easier to invite everybody than to sort through your friends-list and only invite the people you think would be interested. This means that quite often, we get invitations to events we don’t even care about. Sally’s party that you can’t make it to is one thing, but “Inform those in your life who are dumb to never reproduce” day is another matter entirely.

Don’t Want to Know

Clearly, “Yes” and “Maybe” aren’t the way to get rid of this, but clicking “No” isn’t going to completely make it go away either. You’ve been invited, and this event is now on your Facebook calendar, and every event on your Facebook calendar will show up on your Home-Page in the “Events” section starting three days before the event occurs to the moment it ends.

To prevent this, take a look a the blue text beneath the “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” buttons. The little blue hyper-link there reading “Remove from my Events” will remove every scrap of that event from your Facebook experience.

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Recently, Google made some changes to its search by changing a few of the factors that determine the order of the results of a search. (Prior to this change, I actually used to be the top result when searching “Jonah Price” now however its some Lawyer with a relatively empty ‘profile‘ on his law firm’s website.) Fresh from this big – though probably un-noticed by Joe Schmoe – change, Google is going to do it again, and this time Joe is going to know.

Google is going to modify its interface! They’ve mixed things up on the Home Page, and added a sidebar to the search results. Using the method published by Gizmodo and then republished by Mashable I was able to test out these changes.

WARNING: Changing back to the old interface requires certain technological skill.  If you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of manually creating and deleting cookies, I’d advize you avoid experimenting with it. (Mashable’s guide includes instructions for undoing the changes, Gizmodo’s does not.)

The Home Page: In Yo-FACE!

The change of Google’s home page was what most shocked me; everything I’d read about the new interface talked about the results page I’d heard nothing of any modifications to Google’s starting location. With my cookies modified to alter Google to show me the new interface, I was presented with the following:

The search box is thicker from top to bottom, and shorter from left to right. The Google Logo is flatter, and has lost its drop shadow. And the buttons, which Google had recently begun to de-emphasize are now much LARGER, bold, and blue.

Google’s home page has rarely gone through such dramatic changes. Most any modification has always been as subtle as the over-all design it self, what happened that Google decided  to get louder?

Search Results: The Sidebar

Enter your Query into the search box and press enter; in the new Google interface your search results come up along the right side of this side-bar. Selecting “More” expands the side-bar to include options such as Blogs, News, Video, Maps, Shopping, etc. Selecting any of these options modifies the search results to only include the content indicated by your selection.

Each category is accompanied by filters that show up at the bottom of the side-bar. “Everything” provides a filter that will omit results out of a certain time frame. “Videos” has filters for video length, film quality, closed captions, as well as time frame.

Nothing in the sidebar is new functionality, but it is perhaps, a little bit more useable. The likelihood of a casual Googler coming across these search tools is much larger in the format of this sidebar than in the old interface, where the options where a little less obvious, and took more clicks to get to.

Beta Blues

The new Google interface is right now only a test verision – that Google hasn’t even officially released – and as such, things aren’t streamlined. The “Images” and “Maps” categories on the sidebar currently direct you to the corresponding page in the old interface, but simply returning to the home page will get you back to the new interface.

Other Differences

There are a few minor differences at this point between results in the new interface and the old one, most of which are features from the old interface not carrying over into the new one. For instance, the video search results page has always included an embedded player on the right side of the page, used to play the discovered videos without leaving Google. The new interface no longer has the embedded player, but instead has Sponsored Links. The news results had a collapsed categories selection in top left of the typical results page. The new interface gives no categories selection. Of course, just because they aren’t there now doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t plan to implement them before its release. All we can do is wait and see.

What do you think? Is the new sidebar going to make your Googling a little easier? Is the new feel of the Home Page an improvement? Have you tested the new Google yourself? Leave a comment below.

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Wednesday, it was reported on Mashable that Hulu – the web service that popularized television on the internet – was Flirting with Music Video

Norah Jones it seems, can now be found – among Saturday Night Live, Glee, Dollhouse, and Desperate Housewives – on Hulu.

As an avid supporter of Hulu, I was happy and excited to see such a great service expanding like this. Though I wasn’t exactly a big fan of Norah Jones – I wasn’t exactly sure who she was – I eagerly clicked play on the video embedded underneath Mashable’s story.

I found myself immediately disgruntled at being presented with – instead of the music video I was expecting, – a thirty-second advert. Blinking in surprise I realized that I should have expected this. Hulu was all about Ads. After years of illegal and ad-free content on the web, Hulu was the one that started bringing the content to the web legitimately, paying for it all with ads.

Yet there was something unsettling about having my, two-minute long video prefaced by something I didn’t want to watch as long as a fourth of what I DID want to watch. The simple act of including a commercial was completely altering the experience of a Music Video.

After watching a few videos I found that the experience wasn’t always exactly the same. Sometimes the ads were 30 seconds, at other times 11 seconds, and even sometimes 4 seconds. The shorter times – the 4 seconds especially – were much more bearable. Still, I think the consumer of music video is much more used to the instant gratification of the play button.

What do you think? Will Hulu be successful with Music Video? Do you think the ads will prove to be a problem?

This video is powerful, and I’d rather let it speak for itself.