that’s whacked

Last.fm tagging

Thursday, Mar 19. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

In the week and a half since we shipped Songbird 1.1, what have we been up to?  Well besides grandly horking a whole ton of iPods (sorry sorry sorry!), we’ve also been planning and scheming on some cool new stuff for the future.  Quite frankly, while doing performance and feature parity stuff is always good – we wanted to work on something innovative and different. Matt did a bunch of awesome mockups and threw up a planning doc on the wiki for anyone interesting in seeing what our [very rough] plans are.

Anyway, if you take a look you’ll see a big part of it revolves around activities, e.g. actions the user does to interact with their music.  We’re talking things like:

• rating songs
• making playlists
• adding new tracks to their collection
• tagging songs
• etc.

We’re looking to build something that can socialise these sorts of behaviours more and share them with a group.  It’s the online equivalent of you coming over to my house, and me saying “Check out this new album I found the other day, I’ve been listening to it on repeat all day.” Not only that, it’s also about the subsequent interaction and discussion we have…. e.g. you saying “OMG. Vanilla Ice? You’ve been listening to that all day??” and then you calling up all my other friends to tell them what a loser I am.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on what happened yesterday.  Instead, let’s focus on what we’re doing today.  We’ve been thinking about what sorts of activities make sense, how people would want to share them and consume their different friends’ activities.  I happened to be fixing a couple of Last.fm Radio bugs today (random tangent: we should be pushing this live next week!), when it occurred to me we could do something neat with Last.fm tagging.  Long story short, I was able to throw together something quick today that seems to do the job:

It throws a tag icon into the love/ban area of the faceplate, and when clicking it pops up a gratuitously-translucent panel allowing you to see the Last.fm tags applied (both by yourself and other Last.fm users).  You can add new tags, as well as delete any personal tags you’ve tagged the track with.

Ultimately it’d be nice to commit these tags into the Songbird local library so you can neat things like arbitrarily sort or filter your library based on tags but that’ll require some more bird-side work.

For now, this is a cheap and easy tagging solution that gives me a “tagging” action that we can make use of for our larger plan of socialising Songbird interactions.  The work has been committed to SVN and should be available in tonight’s nightly add-ons build.