Month: March 2010

This summer, my family and i are moving to NYC for the first two weeks in August. My oldest daughter was accepted into the ABT summer program so we decided we would all do this together. 

So now I need to find a place to rent. Ideally looking for a 3-4 bedroom in the West Village, Chelsea or soho.

Any pointers or suggestions would be great.

Thanks in advance! 

How I experience music these days hasn’t changed much over the past few years.

It’s still mostly a combination of folks I follow on Tumblr and Twitter. I also find out about new bands from the Hype Machine. And I get my social radio fix from last.fm.

The new thing in the mix for me is Extension.fm which I’ve written about before.

And I love all of these services. They are simply amazing.

However, I’m wondering if this mix of tools is the right approach or does a more focused service need to exist to be laser focused on providing the best social network experience for music.

Right now, last.fm does a great job keeping track of my music playback history with their scrobbler. It works across multiple third party services and that data is pure gold.

But there isn’t a timeline. The logged in home page doesn’t look social even though there is a lot of social stuff built into the guts of the service like friends and neighborhood radio..

Here’s what the last.fm home page looks like:

That’s not the timeline or dashboard interface I’ve come to love from my favorite social nets.

There are also a variety of other tools out there that keep track of stuff my friends buy or consume (think Blippy). When a friend of mine buys a new record, shouldn’t that stuff show up in a music social net timeline? Or when they heart their favorite track on hypem or tumblr. Or when they see a live show?

I think there is a lot of opportunity to create a lightweight, simple & focused music social network that does a few things right and supports other services too.

The danger is that it becomes a dysfunctional swiss army knife which would be a missed opportunity.

I was reading Fred’s post today, The Ideal Phone System, and what stands out is how many older technologies didn’t stand the test of time because they were designed with a different set of assumptions about the evolution of voice.

In some ways, Fred’s post reminds me of my longtime desire to find the ideal home entertainment system.

As we’ve moved a number of times, I’ve created and changed our home a/v system several times over. In a nutshell (with many iterations along the way) my home entertainment system has evolved from:

-designed my own PC based server streaming media to PCs/Macs connected to our av system (optimized for local media)

-then I went to a closed, complicated, proprietary, expensive system (also optimized for local media)

-now I use low cost, easy to use products that mostly stream online media (some are open and others are closed but getting better)

The key thing is that the systems I had in the past assumed I had large amounts of home storage requirements. I can’t find it at the moment but I wrote a blog post a number of years ago about the challenges of backing up & organizing my media.

You would think as time went on that this problem would have compounded in complexity and demand. After all I regularly create and consumer more content photos, videos, music, text, etc).

But these days my home entertainment system is actually simple and fairly easy to maintain.

So what’s different now?

The vast majority of my content is streamed from the web. It’s not on my local network. Its a stream that I request and not a file that I manage. That’s a fundamental change thanks to our wonderful FIOS 20/20Mbps network. And as far as I’m concerned any devices that I add to my entertainment system has to be built for the internet stream and not the local file.

* * *

It’s intersting to watch TiVo make this change. The original TiVo was designed in a world where the best video content came from your cable operator. These days online video is extremely compelling and getting better all the time. So TiVo is changing. It’s less about bigger and bigger disks in the DVR and more about web content. That’s smart.