Some thoughts on Facebook music + the problem with social listmaking
2 ♥I have to say that I don’t really enjoy it all that much. On one hand, I like the fact that you no longer have to really post a song into Facebook for people to listen to. That’s handy, I guess. But it’s outweighed by the fact that if you play music, the most casual observers look at that and think “oh, they must be online.” For those of us who might spend entirely too much time online — but not using social services — this is a bit strange.
I don’t care if someone goes to look for stuff. If last.fm scrobbles my music, it does it for me. (I mean, my last.fm library is data that I like having for my own purposes)
Facebook compiles my music for themselves and presumably because they assume that my friends want to hear my music too. The way they do it is even more incomplete than say, The Zune Social but with less utility because it’s clearly designed to be used for their own purposes. This is almost true. A good subsection of my friends do consider themselves tastemakers and with those folks, I’m happy to share. The other 85% or so? Not nearly as much. But I’ve found that the fundamental problem with filtering content is that you often miss the audience, because it’s based on assumptions that the people you group want to hear certain things and others don’t.
Maybe this is easy on a nascent network like Google+ or if you’re one of those people who is brazen enough to live their entire life out on the web regardless of the assumptions people make from piecing together things that don’t necessarily correspond. (they do this anyway, I know. But why make it so damn easy?)
But for those blurry lines between folks who are engaged with your content and those who are not, it’s difficult to create hard and fast lines. So I just try not to give a damn at all. In the end, it’s not that serious and if you’re that concerned about what people think or are going to say, you’re almost better pulling that content out all together.
This is really just stream of consciousness posting. I’m sure they’ll “improve” it over time once it’s released, since right now it’s just beta to developers or other people who want to dork around with it, but I’m still not as excited about it as was when it was released. It’s a good logical step forward, but for my own personal reasons…I think creating silos where you have the freedom to express yourself without having to always explain everything is preferable.
Though on the flip side, I’m starting to think that maybe it doesn’t really matter as much as I used to. If there’s an evolution in how I communicate online or how I present myself, this will influence it more than anything. But it’s a matter of gradients, timing and all of that.
