The VIP Music Listening Experience

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by fluffisch

These days, I have no idea what the actual name of the song is for half the songs I listen to on my phone. They just play in a continuous stream through my earpods. I suppose this is no worse than when I had a CD player and only knew the track number of the song.

So, imagine listening to an album that is being DJ’d by the artist himself. So, as the first track ends on that Bob Dylan album, you hear Bob mention the title of the track, maybe one or two interesting tidbits about it or the upcoming song, and you continue on with the album this way.

In the case with a deceased artist, you could have different people do the same thing, e.g., producers, family, friends, other influential musicians in the same genre. With a little imagination, you can see complementary and alternate versions of the same idea.

The value here is twofold. First, your listening experience is enhanced. You know not only the titles of the songs, but also a little bit more about the whole album, and often from the band themselves.

Secondly, this service could be cloud-based, such that these snippets are served to your device as needed, which would allow them to be a value add for a distribution service like iTunes or Spotify, and should encourage people to acquire their music honestly.

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Client: Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, RIAA

When Google Fails


cc licensed flickr photo shared by westpark

“Just Google it.” (No one ever says, “Just Yahoo it,” much to Yahoo’s dismay.)

I’m not convinced that Google’s artificial intelligence has made it out of grade school yet. To prove this, all you need to do is imagine a destructive idea—making Google have the wrong answer.

You can already see this idea being carried out on a small scale, with people learning how Google ranks pages, and subsequently getting their pages ranked higher. These pages are only intended to serve impression ads, and often do not have the information the user was looking for when they first searched. While this phenomenon is still a growing one, it has so far been contained by the narrow interest of the perpetrator.

But, what if a group of people decided that they had no revenue interest in any one particular manipulated Google result, but instead wanted to make as many common inquiries to Google return results that are completely inaccurate and irrelevant—at least within the first 10-20 listings.

This concentrated effort would show that the algorithms that Google uses could not effectively address the problem before the troublemakers would be able to adapt and evolve themselves. A band of misfits numbering less than a thousand could probably stay ahead of Google’s efforts to stop their trouble making. This is largely because Google is doing everything in house.

To illustrate, imagine a factually correct Wikipedia result that someone one day decides to alter. The mistake will be corrected in a very short period of time, relatively speaking, because each visitor is like a tiny quality control department. A page of irrelevant Google results, on the other hand, will go much longer before being corrected, given what is required for Google’s personnel and algorithms to notice the problem.

I believe a vulnerability that undermines Google Search is an Achilles heel to the entire brand. There is a threshold of error that users will collectively allow, and if Google continues to move toward this instead of away from this, users will begin to search for an alternative (pun most definitely intended.)

I’m trying to describe a way for a new service to effectively compete without giving away too much of the delicious secret sauce.

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Highlighting In GMail


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Sandyhombre

I’ve recently made the switch to GMail, after spending many years at Yahoo!, who recently dropped the ball with their latest redesign. I had gone with Yahoo! in the earlier days because the aesthetic design of GMail left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, GMail (and Google more generally) has come a long way since I first used it.

That said, I think there should be the capability in GMail to highlight parts of a message and either have this highlighting stay a part of the message in your archive, and/or allow the highlighting to be sent along with the message if you were forwarding it or replying to it.

Gmail-highlighting

This way, I could highlight the part of the message that was important to me, and when I needed to reference the email again, I wouldn’t have to waste time relocating the part or parts of the message that I’m probably looking for. 

It’s easy to imagine how this could help the conversation if you were replying to an email and wanted to reference a specific part of the original email without cutting and pasting. Or, if you were forwarding the message, you do the recipient the courtesy of directing their attention to the part you wanted them to look at.

I’m thinking the highlighting could be toggled on or off, and maybe you offer 3-5 different colors of highlighting later on. I’d be happy with the standard yellow for now. 

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UPDATE: While GMail does not allow highlighting of messages before archiving or attaching as a forward, it does allow highlighting of inline forwarded messages when composed in HTML.