Hello folks!
I would like to introduce our brand-new release, Gigulate Widgets.
With Widgets we’ve tried to make it super simple for anyone to take music news or gigs and make a super simple Flash widget to embed into pretty much anything.
So whether you want a widget showing the latest Vampire Weekend news or the most important gigs in your area, for example: London, it’s super easy. What’s more, Gigulate’s widgets are fully customisable and super-smart.
(You’ll notice that I’ve dropped an example Nine Inch Nails news widget into the page just to give you a taster)
Also, you may recently have noticed the look and feel of Gigulate gradually changing. That’s because we’ve been updating the design. It’s Gigulate 1.6 – part of our ongoing process to improve and tweak the experience.
We’d love your feedback on both the new design, and our new widgets. Try them out for yourself in the new Gigulate Widgets section.
Pip pip!
John.
Today we at Gigulate are very excited to announce the next major Gigulate release: Personalisation.
What does this mean?
There are a bunch of new features, all focused around making the Gigulate experience work specifically for your own music tastes.
My Dashboard
Once registered on Gigulate, this is your go-to place for music news and gigs. It’s all personalised exactly for you: stick Artist names into your own Watchlist (I’ll explain that in a bit), and Gigulate will track them for you.
Everything on the dashboard is automagically filtered to be exactly what you want. No News stories or Gig recommendations about artists you don’t care about.
Watchlist
This is the place you visit to tell us what the most important artists are in your life, so Gigulate can give you a personal experience. But don’t worry: it won’t take you long to get your watchlist full of artists that you care about. Here’s why:
- Quick Add – Stick an artist you want to hear about in the quick add box and you’re away. It’s the old fashioned way of filling up your watchlist. But if you only want to track say, 10 artists it’s perfect.
- Site Importer – Already got a profile on another music website? Then use the Gigulate Site Importer to quickly add all your artists. At the moment we offer support for: Last.fm, Myspace, iLike, Soundcloud and Pandora. We’ll be adding support for loads of other music sites soon. So check back here (on the blog) for updates.
- Music Scanner – Got a local music collection on a computer? This simple app allows you to quickly scan your mp3 or aac folders for artists and sync them with your watchlist.
Find out more
Twitter alerts
For some this is an added bonus, for others, it’s going to be really useful. We’re announcing our Twitter alerts service. It takes about 30 seconds to get it working, simply follow @GigulateAlerts and get direct messages about the artists you care about, so you can be in the know about the music news you care about as soon as it breaks. And don’t worry about the size of your watchlist, you can manage it seperately, either from Gigulate.com, or directly using commands such as ADD, REMOVE and LIST through Twitter. Find out more
We really hope you like these new features, we’ve had great fun building them.
If you spot any bugs or would like to leave feedback leave a comment on this blog post or @ me on twitter: @johnmartin
A while ago at the OpenMusicMedia Meet in December, I got into a discussion about personalisation and afterwards thought it useful to knock together a blog post to capture our thoughts on the subject.
Effort versus gain
Personalisation is very important to us, but we don’t think the traditional method of input is the most effective. Traditionally to personalise a website/application you have to input data or take relevant action to get useful information out.
A key example of this is Last.fm. In order to get the most out of it there is a certain amount of time and effort you have to dedicate to creating a profile and advancing the service. In my opinion it’s one of the most integral parts of Last.fm, without it they wouldn’t have a vibrant community.
But this wouldn’t work for us. We want to minimise the amount of time that a user has to spend consciously handing value back to Gigulate and maximise the gain from the minimum they have put in.
Passive Personalisation
Passive personalisation is personalisation that takes place under the hub of the service you are using. Google have been doing it for a while on their search results. E.g. you get different results if you are logged in than if you are logged out. It’s interesting enough, but ultimately an unsatisfying method for a user to personalise a service.
It’s all well and good telling a user that just by using a service you are personalising it. But without direct and immediate results showing a user how you are bettering the experience it’s difficult for a anybody to trust in a benevolent machine.
The Balance
For us at Gigulate it’s an important balancing act that will create the best personalisation experience. We’ll allow users to use as little time and effort possible, but it’s also provide quantitative and immediate results based on your input. We’re also keen to allow advanced users to really adjust the granularity of their experience. Whether that’s by importing their Last.fm/Facebook profile into Gigulate, inputing artists manually through an ajaxy input box or taking a mix of all of those tools and building them into a robust mix.
Be all and end all
For us… personalisation is important, but it’s not the be all and end all. We want to provide the best experience for everyone and you. But our music experts believe in Editorial: make the product work for everyone and make it work for your tastes/needs as well. Over the coming months we’ll be releasing features that will help everyone get the best out of Gigulate.
