It is a great feeling when the design work you do on a white board or computer mockup makes its way to the real world. Our own Justin Donaldson had this feeling with the release of Artistnet, a visualization tool for communal playlists. Justin created this application while interning with MyStrands in the summer.
There is a little video in which Justin describes his new interface. In the YouTube page blurb,
Strands of related artists will form from individual user’s listening histories. Eventually, these strands will connect, establishing the artist as a “hub” of shared musical information between the two users.
The visualization serves as a sort of primitive recommendation system as well. If you see an artist you recognize and enjoy, see who they’re connected to. You may just happen to see a new artist or track that you don’t recognize, and there’s a good chance that they’ll be worth a listen as well. MyStrands captures these opportunities in far more detail in our recommendation engine, enabling our community to explore artists, users, albums and many other items with equal ease. All these relationships form our “matrix of associations” which establishes a “ground truth” for how we at MyStrands understand the world of media content.
What is very interesting about this visualization is the pace. Unlike Digg-like viz applications—where thousands of users are all reading and responding to web content at the same time—the rate at which users can go through a song is constrained by the length of the song, usually about 3-5 minutes. That means the visualization is very slow, not something to watch as much as revisit.
Actually, it has a very similar kind of pace as that of an active personal information stream in Twitter. I wonder if the user experience and value of the Artistnet would be enhanced by incorporating some desktop notification, like Twitterrific. I can work and listen to music and have new songs from my group pop up and then disappear. If I notice something I like, I can click to bring focus to the full visualization. If not, I just ignore and keep working (and listening).
Congratulations, Justin.
