Free Candy For Everyone

New websites comes along all the time. My friends call out “hey, I’ve got free invites for the newest hottest site, who wants?” and I’m always jumping on to see what it is. Most of them I can’t remember a day after I signed up. But the most recent one I’m playing with has gotten my attention. It’s called blippr and the tagline is “Radically Short Ratings and Reviews.” The idea is that people rate books, movies, music and video games with “blips” - 160 character or less mini-reviews.

Ever since I first started browsing the internet I’ve been enthralled by ratings websites. I remember the first recommendation website I found, way back in college. You could rate movies and it would suggest other movies you might like! I spent hours rating things on it, just stars, but I loved it. I think I’ve since gone though and rated hundreds of items on dozens of websites. I mostly use Amazon at this point and have given up on the rest. But this one seemed fun so I’m giving it a try.

There isn’t really enough data yet to give you recommendations yet, so I’ve just been having fun rating things. You rate on a 4 point scale - don’t like, whatever, like it, love it. The final score for the item is some sort of average of everyone’s ratings, but it’s fun to read what people have to say. The recommendations come in by the fact that it’s also a social network site. You can follow people you tend to agree with. You can also agree or disagree with any single blip. This information is compiled to give you recommendations.

I’m finding a lot of joy out of crafting the perfect 160 character blip. How can I say what I want in a concise and interesting way? Sometimes I get to the limit and go back deleting and rewording to get my point across. It’s fun!

It’s still in beta so you’ll need an invite, of course. Email me if you want one, I still have a few. Things I’d like to see - maybe some sort of authority rating based on how many people have agreed with you or disagreed. I’d also hope that the different types of media have separate recommendation scales. I find that while I may agree with people in regards to movies and books, my music taste is vastly different. I really doubt they’ll be able to recommend a music album for me based on what movies I like.

Overall, it’s fun. I find myself popping over there and reviewing at least one or two items a day. We’ll see how long they keep me interested!

I’ve been using Last.fm to track my listening habits for a couple of years now. I’ve written about it several times on the site, but if you don’t know what it is, the idea is it’s a streaming music radio station that tracks what you listen to and recommends music. But it also has plugins for iTunes and the like so it can always watch what you are listening to. Yay, this let’s me see pretty charts of my listening habits! Awesome. Check out my page to see some charts and stuff.

Well, Binary Bonsai had a post up about a site that creates beautiful graphs of your listening habits. I loved it so much I had to just re-blog it. Pretty graphs make me happy (this is probably one reason I’m a programmer, I like orderly things. I like data!).

Check out LastGraph if you have your very own Last.fm account. You’ll quickly be looking at awesome graphs yourself!

P.S. The aesthetics remind me of the Baby Name Voyager, an awesome applet that let’s you see the popularity of names over time in the US.

Amen, I say, amen to that.

[Via Binary Bonsai]

When writing my post of top time wasters I forgot one of them - Facebook. Facebook, you say? Yeah, the social networking site/application platform. With applications like iLike, I can lose way too much time. iLike is a music site, it integrates with the favorites artists you have listed on Facebook to tell you about upcoming concerts by your favorite bands. You can also use it to embed music in your profile. But my favorite way to waste time with it is the music quiz. It’s basically name-that-tune. They play a clip and you have to identify the artist or the song title. The quicker you respond, the more points you get. I like trying to answer as quickly as possible so my average response time is really low. It’s great fun and somehow I managed to just sit there listening, listening for quite some time.

Every time I go over to MySpace I cringe at the loud busy pages. But Facebook is so slimmed down. And it has great apps like Vampires vs. Werewolves that let’s you bite your friends, and Flixster that let’s you rate and review movies. It has a cool little Movie Compatibility Test that let’s you see how much like your friends your music tastes are.

And that’s enough about Facebook. I think I’ve written 3 posts about how fun it is. That’s enough. It’s not all that much fun, but it is a nice way to waste a few minutes here and there.

I’ll admit it, I’ve never really been a fan of Coldplay. I didn’t really understand what everyone was so excited about when their first single (”Yellow”) hit. It just sort of annoyed me. But they’ve been around for a bit of a while now and they’ve put out several successful albums. People seem to like them.

Well, I might have to finally change my opinion. I left out one of my time wasters on my list yesterday. While playing games or working on my blog, I pretty much always have the tv on. I watch shows off my DVR, movies I get through Blockbuster online, and when I have nothing else to watch I turn on the MHD channel. It’s a high def channel that airs MTV, VH1, and CMT shows in HD, as well as videos. There are frequent episodes of Unplugged, Storytellers and Crossroads. I’ve watched episodes on Green Day, Alicia Keyes, and Bon Jovi. It’s pretty great - looks good and sounds good.

Tonight here was a Storytellers on Coldplay. They played mostly songs I’d already heard but for the first time I actually liked them. I don’t know what it is, but for me, seeing the musicians talk about their music and get passionate about it makes me like it more. It doesn’t make much sense, does it? But somehow, seeing the artists as people makes me appreciate their sound more. Strange, huh. Well, I now have something new to add to my shopping list for the next time I go to Amoeba.