Monday, June 15, 2009

Were you there?

Thanks to Fred's tweet this AM, I spent some time over at Songkick today.

At Songkick, you can create your own personal "gigography", import your last.fm profile, add concerts, update information / provide commentary about concerts, set a tracker to see when artists you like are coming to your area

- basically it's a way to broadcast your concert going history by claiming "I was there"

My own personal concert-going history is now being memorialized at my Songkick profile page. Yes, Boston, Poco and the Doobie Brothers was the first show I ever went to.

Not sure how useful it will be going forward, but it is interesting to see what concerts they already have in their database. Even shows at Lupo's in Providence I had long forgotten about were in there. Interesting.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

According to Dogster....

and their "what dog breed are you?" quiz, I'm a Golden Retriever!

What dog breed are you? I'm a Golden Retriever! Find out at Dogster.com

Are we ready for vertical social networks?

I've been doing some thinking about vertical social networks (VSNs).

Generally, VSNs are the cable channels of the social networks. Rather than going wide (facebook, linkedin) across people's interests, they go narrow and deep. In retrospect, we created one such network with Upto11.net back in 2004 (though we certainly didn't think of it that way then).

You could make an argument that P2P networks are inherently a VSN (around music discovery) and a rather unique demonstration that VSNs can succeed even when everyone chooses to remain anonymous.

The questions I'm focused on at the moment are:
  1. What are the drivers that cause a person to take the leap and join a VSN?
  2. What's base level of value/utility have to be in place to cause someone to join one?
  3. How many people already have to be there to make it worth becoming a member?
  4. Do people need their "real" friends to be there already to join (especially later adopters)? or are VSNs the means for folks to make new friends who share a particular interest?
  5. What's the right blend of "passer by" features vs. "member" features to encourage adoption in order to get the network effect going?
More later, off to check out dogster.