Google - Search History

I just discovered that Google Talk can now track your listening and have ti turn up in your search history. Inevitably it doesn't quite work right.

So here we have a Creative Zen Xtra with an 80Gb disk and PlaysForSure firmware. This plays into Winamp using the beta V5.25 build which can stream tracks from a connected (iPod/Creative NJB/PFS/USB) player. Google talk then picks this up from the winamp window name, it then reports it up to Google. Except that the default Winamp layout is "Artist - Title". Google reverses this in Googletalk status to "Title - Artist" which makes more sense. Except that I agree so I've modified my playlist display in Winamp to "Title : Artist (album : track number)" which works better for me. So google then can't always find the artist and sometimes reverses my reversed display. Hey Ho.

I've also written a bot to grab the Winamp window title and drop it into my Skype status.

But then there's Last.FM. Last.FM's scrobbling refuses to scrobble streams. Which means that when I play back tracks from my external player they don't get scrobbled and added to my Last.FM profile. Which is a shame. Especially when I'm picking that up via RSS and dropping it into the box over on the right. Now it turns out that the Last.FM plugin for winamp did do streamed music once and the source code was available. So clearly I'm going to have to hack that.

Any Road Up. Looking at Google Music vs Last.FM It's clear to me that Google doesn't grok community in Web 2.0 stuff. There's no way to aggregate music into friends although they do encourage you to join the GoogleGroup for an artist. And their music genres suck just as much as everyone esle's. That's another story, which Last.FM's music tags don't quite fix. And that luscious google data about what you listen to isn't visible to anyone else and has no RSS/Atom feed. Just like your personalised search page isn't visible to anyone else.

There's a disconnect here. Google is fascinated by the statistics of it all. And it constantly pushes the short head of the zeitgeist. When we people out in the long tail want to find the other long tailers in our little niche, not be told that ColdPlay and Snow Patrol are at the top of the short head. And that fascination with statistics and Internet scale search works against individual people communicating with other independent people.

This all started when I found out that GoogleTalk no longer requires a Gmail address to sign in with. Great. Except that my other three Google accounts with other email addresses are independent. I can sign in with them, but then Google thinks I'm another person with another set of contacts and friends. We really need to separate "Identity" here from "Authentication" and I badly need a way of telling Google to merge and aggregate my accounts. It's not 3 people with 3 email addresses. It's one person with 3 email addresses. Yahoo discovered this problem as did LinkedIn and they dealt with it. One day I'll deal with it on Ecademy.


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[ 29-Sep-06 11:58am ] [ , , ]