Pandora- Internet Radio
Recently I started using Pandora. It is a service that allows you to listen to free internet radio. It is amazing because it allows you to listen to what you want to hear. When you listen to normal radio they don’t know you. They don’t know what you want to hear and so when they play songs you don’t like you have to endure. No longer. With Pandora you can create various stations and tell them what sort of music you like to listen to and they play it. You can enter artist names or songs and they find music by those artists and also find music that is similar to the music you entered and play it for you.
This is a great way to find new artists to listen to and to expand your musical horizons. I love it. If it plays a song I don’t like I click the thumbs down button and it stops the song and starts playing a different one. Now I don’t have to worry about that song every again. Likewise songs that I like get the thumbs up and it keeps playing them and songs like them.
The only thing is that Pandora is radio not music on demand. Due to legal restrictions they can’t play a song you specify on demand and you can’t backtrack and listen to specific songs over again. But you can’t do that in normal radio anyway.
I think that Pandora is a great service and use it all the time to spice up my web browsing.
Intuu: Interest Networking?
Intuu, a new social networking site, is centered around your interests. Intuu lets you create pages for your various interests: cooking, gaming, sewing, programming, underwater basket weaving; whatever they may be. The idea is that you publish your interests and then find other people with the same interests. You can choose a main interest out of your interests that appears next to your name when you post a comment. There is also a useful interest search bar at top of the page so you can find all the people with a particular interest.
My Opinion
In my opinion Intuu doesn’t really accomplish anything. All you can do is post pages about what you like, not really anything revolutionary. There are probably thousands of sites out there were you can talk about what you like, pretty much every social network does this. So why do we need a social network dedicated to this. Others offer this and other features while as far as I can tell Intuu does nothing. There isn’t anything to do other than find people who like the same stuff as you and comment on their page. Granted it is still an early release and only in beta testing but if this is all it is going to be there is no reason to visit the site.
Also for a site supposedly all about sharing your interests it doesn’t have very intuitive interest pages. Basically you have the title of the page, your interest (ie. blogging), then you have three fields that you can title and then give a description. The default titles are: How I got into it, Why I like it and What I plan to do with it. These aren’t particularly good prompts and thus most people won’t use them or write very little. Granted you can change these titles but for a user trying to find the purpose of this site there isn’t a whole lot of inspiration there. Also at the bottom of every page you can create a list and add headlines. The lists can be of anything ( goals for your interest, random facts, etc.. ) and the headlines are basically a status update for the interest. For example if you are into programming then you could make headlines for when you finish a new program, start a new project or learn a new language.
As the site stands currently I find it rather useless. Hopefully it will release some revolutionary new feature that will make it worthwhile but right now there is nothing like that. There are other sites that provide a much better venue for sharing your interests for example StumbleUpon or Twine. To visit my intuu click here.
Other Sites to See
