gigulate – blog

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.

A Happy New Year then. It’s cold in London.

After a season of excess, we’re all making resolutions: eat-less/eat-more drink-less/drink more, go to more concerts/go to better gigs, discover new music/rediscover old bands.

Here at Gigulate we’ve taken a quiet (read:poor) Christmas to get everything in order, we have elected to skip the hedonism and debauchery for a few weeks to start the detox early, fix up the Gigulator’s innards and make it super-reliable for the volume of juicy information it’s going to be sifting and sorting. Scouring all the world’s music news, blogs and local concert listings requires a fair old amount of power, and that’s before the Gigulator has even started to sort it meaningfully, so we knew we’d need some serious power to prevent a fail whale.

So that’s just what we’re going to promise in 2009, if you’ll bear with us for a few weeks <perhaps take this valuable time to enthuse to close friends and relatives about what the Gigulator is going to provide for you, every minute of the day <ahem>). Here’s a summary for the uninitiated:

1. The fastest meaningful snapshot of the music world with relevant, valuable concert listings in your area. So you can get up to speed on the music scene, or find gigs everybody is talking about in a few seconds.

2. An archive for every Artist and music source that matters, from across the web. What are they doing? Where are they? Where are they playing next? Who are they playing with? Who is discussing them?

3. Something you can rely on. Gigulate isn’t designed to replace your favourite music website. But it’ll always be here – churning through, ready for you to visit first in order to make subsequent visits to other places more valuable.

4. Informed and informative. Gigulate has been developed by passionate music fans, experienced journalists and industry experts to be an independent, unbiased experience built on the coolest web technology.

Oh, there’s much much more than that. We’ll be in touch soon.

Become a fan at Facebook, or drop our RSS into your favourite reader to stay up to date. We’ve a group going too, and we’re working on Twitter if you’re really keen or a bit of a Twit.  Wish us luck.

xx