When everybody was anxiously awaiting the new iPhone 3G, I just sat there and said “nope, not gonna upgrade—I like what I have.” No, I wasn’t in denial or just being difficult. It’s just that when you don’t really go anywhere, there’s not much of a need for things like GPS. And EDGE is pretty sweet where I am, so the 3G wasn’t all that appealing.

Plus there’s the fact that I’ve been with AT&T ever since they were Cingular (and actually had their shit together), so I’ve got some sort of grandfathered super cheap family plan that I’m not too keen on parting with.

But the big reason is that us iPhone 1.0 kids still get the software upgrade. That’s what I wanted. The software.

I wanted APPS.

So, a couple weeks after upgrading to iPhone 2.0, I wanted to share some of my favorite iPhone apps.

(Note that all links are to iTunes App Store)

Last.fm

During the first iPhone 2.0 weekend, if I saw one more tweet that said “OMFG Pandora for iPhone is sooooo awesome!” I… well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. I just sat there on my high Last.fm horse saying “so what, Last.fm is still better… even with no iPhone app!”. Then Last.fm released an iPhone app. And I was thrilled.

The Last.fm app allows you to listen to a radio station of your music library (tracks you’ve scrobbled before), stations based on any artist you like, stations based on any of your friends or neighbours (those Last.fm users with taste most similar to yours) libraries, and—of course—a station of only recommendations based on your listening habits.

I’ll save the gushing of how much I love the Last.fm service, because I’ve already done so here many times before.

Wish List:

• The app must stay in the foreground to keep playing. Would be wonderful if it kept playing in the background.
• Artist bios (which are user-generated and generally solid) being available in the app would be nice.
• I would like to sort my Last.fm friends by musical compatibility rating (this is also something I want to see in the web app).

Exposure

Wow. I just found this one today and I’m in love. If you’re a Flickr user with an iPhone, get it. Right away. Everything’s here. View your photos. View your friend’s photos. View featured photos. View geotagged photos near you. You can even view and add comments to photos from within Exposure. This app is about as good as it gets.

There’s a free, ad-based version for free and a $9.99 version with no ads. To be honest, the ads are so unobnoxious there’s little reason to upgrade beyond supporting this fantastic developer. I’d have no problem with them cranking up the advertising level a notch.

Wish List:

• Judging by this Get Satisfaction thread, I’m not alone in wanting the ability to upload from Exposure to Flickr. Why not just email photos to Flickr? Because that compresses them to 640×480. I’d love to retain the camera’s 1600×1200 resolution.

Twinkle

Ah, the race to create the best Twitter app for iPhone. There’s Twitterrific. There’s Twittelator. But for me, it’s Twinkle.

Why Twinkle? It’s pretty, first of all. That’s quite important to me. I also like that it’s location-aware. I can see who’s tweeting near me (quite cool when I was recently on vacation). One limitation is that you only see the local tweets from those using Twinkle, not the entire Twittersphere.

Wish List:

• I do wish there was one dedicated screen for @replies (like it has for direct messages). Twittelator combines these, referring to them collectively as “Replies”. I’m cool with that.
• This one is a limitation of the Twitter API and not Twinkle, but I
  will never be able to rely on a 3rd party Twitter app until they lift the restrictions on API calls. I don’t have Twitter open all the time, so just getting the last 20 or so tweets doesn’t work for me. For this reason, I use m.twitter.com to read tweets more than anything else.

AIM

Quite honestly, it’s AOL Instant Messenger. It works as advertised. In this case, no news is good news.

Wish List:

• My thumb is large. It really is. It covers about 18 iPhone keyboard buttons. Being able to type on the landscape keyboard helps me immensely. I’d love to see this added to the AIM app.

Facebook

I’ve got this love/hate thing with Facebook. Let’s just say the iPhone app is 100% love. The profile browsing, while pretty click-heavy, is very slick. The message inbox is well done, too. I’ve always felt Facebook’s messaging system is it’s #1 feature. It’s so well done. The iPhone app even has chat, though I haven’t found myself using that yet.

Wish List:

• Not much… just let me type in landscape!

WordPress

I’ll admit… this one makes the list without me really using it much yet. But the potential is awesome. Being able to reliably work on blog posts on iPhone will be a huge help. The WPhone plugin has served me well, but feels buggy (especially comment moderation).

This is a very early version of the app, though, and it does need some key features.

Wish List:

• Again… let me type in landscape!
• You can edit local drafts, but not saved drafts on the server. This is kind of a bummer—and weird since you can edit published posts that are on the server.
• Comment moderation, please?
• Being able to post and edit Pages (and maybe even tweak the theme code) would be nice.

I have been using some other apps, but they just didn’t quite crack my “favorites” list. Among those:

Games

I was on vacation last week, so I had a bit of time to play with games. Most often, I played Aurora Feint, but when I installed the update, it blew away my saved game. I’m thinking I won’t have the time or patience to work my way back to where I was. Tap Tap Revenge is just… too cool. I also have played Jirbo Break a bit. Not bad.

For the Pre-Schooler

My daughter is 3 1/2 but is becoming an iPhone power user. She loves flipping between photos, exploring on the Google Map, or typing her name in the Notes app. As far as third party apps, she’s been enjoying Scribble, a very simple drawing game. She also has played JirboMatch (a memory game) and Bubbles (a very simple bubble popping time-waster) a bit.

What else?

I don’t know. I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the apps so far. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but I’m not quite as excited as I thought I would be. I’m not really seeing any type of full featured word-processing apps or much productivity-wise beyond perhaps OmniFocus. iPhone definitely has the potential to be a viable platform, but I’m not feeling it is being taken advantage of yet. It seems that most of the innovation is in the gaming realm. That probably mimics the industry as a whole, but I’m not a gamer. I’d like to be wowed while being productive.

Again, I’m not sure what app it will take to do that. The WordPress app has the potential to be something along those lines. If the AIM app was actually Adium, I’d be far more excited. If the whole 2.0 update was a bit more stable, I’d be far happer.

So, what apps have been your favorites? What’s missing?

There’s no list-head (<lh>) element.

Let’s say I’m marking up a list of my top three Last.fm artists. It would look something like:

<ol>
  <li>Teenage Fanclub</li>
  <li>Mogwai</li>
  <li>Yo La Tengo</li>
</ol>

Which, of course, would then render like:

1. Teenage Fanclub
2. Mogwai
3. Yo La Tengo

But what if I wanted to label that list something like “My Top 3 Artists on Last.fm”. What are my options? I could throw it in a paragraph (<p>) tag. But a random paragraph doesn’t really semantically relate it to the list. I could put it in a header tag (<h1>, <h2>, etc.). That would at least tell me it is a header to something and not just an arbitrary paragraph. But still, that header isn’t associated with the list itself in any meaningful way (beyond proximity).

If I marked this up in a table, I have the option to add a table header (<th>). Tables are for tabular data, so for this example, I’ll show what the markup would look like if I wanted to make a table of my top three artists with the number of times I played them.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>My Top 3 Artists on Last.fm</th>
    <th>Play Count</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Teenage Fanclub</td>
    <td>855</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Mogwai</td>
    <td>755</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Yo La Tengo</td>
    <td>705</td>
  </tr>
</table>

And that would render like this:

Like the header tags and <strong> tag, most (if not all) user agents will show the <th> in bold. Also, since the <th> is a different element than the standard <td>, it is really easy to style headers differently from other table cells.

Best of all, though, the <th> is nested inside the <table>, meaning that it is explicitly a part of that table. Simply adding a <p> or <h3> above the <table> wouldn’t have the same semantic value.

Really all I’m wondering is… why don’t we have a <lh> to use when marking up ordered and unordered lists?

One of my favorite parts of my NewBCamp talk last month was something I had never really talked about (either in person or on this blog) but wanted to take the chance to share: The idea of the URL as UI. So, what is URL as UI?

Computer users have gotten so used to the graphical user interface (GUI) that it is easy to forget that computers basically operate via a series of commands. The web has not only brought the command line back to the surface (with the web browser’s address bar), it has exposed the concept to an entire generation of users that has never seen a command line.

When you access a web site, you are generally typing in a URL (unless, of course, you are selecting a bookmark or following a link from an email, IM, other site, etc.). The URL is essentially a command to go fetch that content. We take components of the URL such as “http://”, “www”, and “.com” for granted now, these are rather arcane expressions that would be nonsensical to non-web user. But since most sites we access start with an “http” (perhaps an “https”) and end with a “.com” (or “.net”, “.org”, etc.), we get used to these conventions.

Many developers take the time to learn the command line instead of using the graphical user interface because it can be faster and more efficient. For example, if I wanted to add a graphic called “button.png” to code base for BatchBook (the web-based contact organizer I’m working on for BatchBlue), I’d have two options. I could:

1. Open a Finder window.
2. Open the folder “svn” in my home folder.
3. Open the folder “batchbook”
4. Open the folder “public”
5. Open the folder “images”
6. Find the file “button.png”
7. Right click on “button.png” and choose “Add” from the contextual menu (I was using SCPlugin for Subversion)

Or, I could do it via the command line like this:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Type “svn add svn/batchbook/public/images/button.png”

Once I learned the conventions, it was an easy choice for me.

Similarly, navigating a web site simply by the URL can be much faster and more efficient than relying on the site’s information architecture and navigation menus.

Unusable URLs

If I visit Amazon.com and search for the album Rock Action by Mogwai, I am directed to a page with this URL (line break mine):

http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/
ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1203311335&sr=8-1

My first question was “how much of this is needed to access the page and how much is session information Amazon is capturing?” Well, turns out that the URL really is:

http://amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/

What’s good about this is that it has the artist and title of the album in the URL. What isn’t so nice is the extra stuff that means nothing to me, the user. I’m sure it means something to Amazon, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be exposed on the front end. If I want to look up a different CD or different artist, I need to rely on the search functions or Amazon’s site architecture, even though I already know exactly what I want.

Is this just Amazon? No. Here’s the URL that Barnes & Noble gives me (again, line break mine):

http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/
product.asp?z=y&EAN=744861049029&itm=1

To me, this is far worse… there is no human readable component here at all.

URL as UI Done Right

So, what’s a good example of URL as UI? Last.fm, of course. Here is the URL for information about Rock Action:

http://last.fm/music/Mogwai/Rock+Action

Now, let’s compare the three showing human usable vs. machine usable data:

(click for larger version)

With Last.fm, if I want to look at the main Mogwai page, I can just delete the “/Rock+Action” part. If I want to look at a different artist page, I simply swap out the “Mogwai” with, say, “Orbit”. If I want to look at a particular Orbit album, I can just add it after the “/Orbit”, such as “/Orbit/Libido+Speedway”.

Notice that everywhere there would be a space, you use a “+”. Once you learn this simple convention, you can keep using it to speed up your interactions with the site.

Another example of a convention you need to learn is the individual track convention. It is possible for an artist to have the same song appear on many albums (such as the standard release, live album, greatest hits, etc.). Last.fm could track these separately but instead chooses to treat these all as one song. So, this is how you would access a single track’s page:

http://last.fm/music/Arcade+Fire/_/Intervention

Notice the “/_/” between the band name and the track name. The underscore in the directory where the album name would normally go signifies that we’re no longer looking at an album—we’re looking at individual tracks. If you were on the page for Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and wanted to look at a different track by them, you’d have to hunt around the page and try to find a link to that track, or more likely go back to the main artist or album page and find it there. Using the URL, you can jump right to “/Ocean+Of+Noise”.

Of course, you can use this technique elsewhere on the site. For example, every artist has a wiki-based bio page, with a URL like http://www.last.fm/music/Mogwai/+wiki. If you wanted to read a few band bios, you’d have type the artist’s name into the search field, land on the artist’s page, and click the “Bio” tab to see each bio (and repeat the process for each artist). Why not just type the artist’s name and that’s it (via the URL)? Same thing goes with photo pages for each artist, video pages, etc.

Also, Last.fm is not the only site doing this right. Another example is Flickr. To see my photos, you go to this URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darowskidotcom/

If you want to go switch to another user’s photos, as long as you know their username you can replace mine with theirs. It works well for tags, too. If you want to see all my photos I have tagged as “redsox”, you can go to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darowskidotcom/tags/redsox/

If you want to see someone else’s photos tagged “redsox”, simply swap in that user’s username. If you’d rather see everyone’s photos tagged “redsox”, just take out the username altogether.

If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.

Update: A translation to Belorussian has been provided by fatcow.

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Today (a couple of hours ago, actually) I gave a presentation called “Introduction to Web Standards” at NewBCamp08, a new unconference in Providence. I’m pleasantly surprised by the turnout, considering it was a first time event with minimal marketing used to spread the word (Twitter played a hand, I bet).

Here’s my talk about Web Standards, microformat goodness, and some URL as UI craziness. The talk seemed to be pretty well received and had a decent turnout with some excellent questions asked.

Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.

When I make the fantasy football comparison, what I’m really saying is these stats are very important to you, and you watch them update like a hawk. Yet, nobody but you likely cares about them at all.

So, that’s the personal value I get out of Last.fm. I love listening to music, but I’m also a stats junkie—particularly baseball (if I do occasionally watch a football game I get completely frustrated if I ask someone what the record is for longest field goal and nobody can tell me). So, I get an additional kick when I see artists overtaking others on my charts.

Well, I came across another site that gave me this type of personal value. I adore Twitter. I use it all the time. But there is very little front end for looking at what you’ve tweeted in the past. Heck, you can’t even search your past tweets. I recently came across a site called Tweeterboard that starts to tap into some of this.

One of the first things that caught my eye about Tweeterboard is that it was developed by Gene Smith, who I saw at Webvisions (the event that completely shifted my career track). Next, what excited me about Tweeterboard may not have even been what is there, but what could be there.

Here’s what’s there:

The Dashboard

Tweeterboard crawls Twitter, collecting data along the way. It uses an algorithm to rank the top Tweeters by reputation points. I have to say, this isn’t the part that I’m all excited about, so I haven’t really looked into how the rankings work.

Gets Love

These are the folks who I specifically talk to on Twitter. If you’re not sure what @username is, you probably either quit reading this already (or you should check this out if I still have you).

So, apparently I write a lot of messages to @hmason, which is funny since she’s a new Twitter buddy. I’m guessing not all tweets have been crawled yet. I could have sworn I’ve tweeted @jharr more than that in a night. In fact, as I read this it looks like his page has not been crawled yet.

Gives Love

Again, looks like a very incomplete list so far and checks of a few friends’ pages show they have not been crawled yet. But these are folks that tweet @adarowski.

Box Score

Nothing says geek fantasy sport more than “box score”. This tab, of course, tallies the tweets to and from a pair of users.

Links

And here’s where they really got me. Any time you post a link to Twitter, Tweeterboard extracts it and adds it to an RSS feed. It’s like del.icio.us for your links you felt compelled to immediately share with the world. I think I’m going to go ahead and subscribe to a bunch of these feeds since the links people share via Twitter are probably far more relevant than those they would save to another site. Why? Well, to me del.icio.us is basically “mobile favorites”. I use it for reference. Twitter I use if I want other people to look at it.

Wish List

Some things I’d like to see.

• On those Gives/Gets Love tabs, I’d like to see a link on each line that brings you to a page that shows all tweets back and forth between those users using @username.
• I’d love to be able to search my old tweets. Perhaps Tweeterboard could provide that since they are crawling them all anyway.
• How about recommended users? Say many of your friends are following a particular person that you aren’t. I wanna know, dammit!
• Hashtags aggregator? Chris Messina has been adding hashtags to some tweets. Some have made fun of him. But this could be a great application for using them.
• I’ve always wanted to see a cool visualization of my tweets over time. If this was available for each user, that’d be great.

I’m sure I could think of more, but those are my first impressions. Very fun app.

Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:

Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.

I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.

If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:

On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”

Ridiculously amazing.

The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).

Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.

So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

personal value precedes network value

I guess that’s why to this day I still haven’t signed up for a MySpace account. I simply have no idea what I would get out of it. I have accounts with a few social networking sites and I’ve noticed that how much I use them more or less directly correlates to what personal value they have to me.

Here are eight social networking sites I have accounts with. Six of them I use enough to have posted links to my profile in my blog footer.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the application on this list I use most for “social” purposes. For those that don’t know, Twitter is an application that is compatible with all sorts of interfaces (web, email, IM, SMS, RSS, etc.) that essentially lets you get status updates from your contacts. It has been described as “microblogging”, “public IM”, or “public away messages”.

I started using it at SXSW, mostly because Evan & Co. were the darlings of the event. But I quickly started to appreciate the value. Not only can you subscribe to friends, you can also subscribe to industry professionals you enjoy learning from. Their Twitter feeds often contain interesting nuggets of information they don’t publish on their blog. That’s the beauty of it. It’s short (140 characters or less) and quick. You can publish and consume quick thoughts without needing to sift through large blog posts.

The basic personal value I get from Twitter is the ability to post short thoughts of my own without having to dedicate an entire blog post. Beyond that, it lets me keep track of folks who are doing the same.

Flickr

Flickr is an easy one. The personal value is public sharing of photos. The networking effects allow me to always have the newest photos of my contacts delivered to my RSS feed. It is a simple, beautiful thing.

Last.fm

I’ve written about Last.fm in the past. Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.

I’ve actually dipped into the networking side of things, as I documented my befriending of my #1 Last.fm “neighbour” (person in the system with listening habits most similar to yourself). I swear, Last.fm must think I’m a Scot.

LinkedIn

Honestly, I’m almost surprised I use LinkedIn. I signed up when a friend wanted to link to me and then I actually started using it when Steve Ganz deployed all those hResumes. Now that Mario Sundar is with them, I’m intrigued.

It requires minimal effort to add contacts, and there are some personal benefits. It is nice to see what old colleagues are up to. In particular, I found out through LinkedIn’s home page that Kate Brigham had joined PatientsLikeMe. That alone was worth the minimal investment. Combing through others’ contacts to find old contacts is also a worthwhile task.

It seems that the possibilities for LinkedIn aren’t even being touched. I mean, right now it is essentially a hyperlinked address book. Things like the new Questions feature are promising. You would think it would have been more prominent in my job search a few months ago. Every once in a while, I see some UX positions listed from my “network”, but everything’s pretty much on the West coast.

That said, I get the feeling that LinkedIn is in it’s infancy and it is going to keep adding more useful functionality.

Del.icio.us

Ah, the site the Del.icio.us Lesson was named for. Tons of personal value here. I use a lot of different browsers and a couple computers. Saving links to Del.icio.us ensures I’ll have them on whatever machine or browser I happen to be on.

I rarely use the network value, but sometimes it can be interesting. For example, it allows you to see who saves your own posts so you can get a better idea about other sites that they find helpful.

YouTube

YouTube can have a HUGE personal benefit if you share a lot of your own videos. I’ve only posted a few, so I don’t utilize it quite that much. But I do also use my account to save excellent live performances (like this) that I want to make sure I can easily find later.

And now, here are the two sites not yet in my blog footer—meaning… I simply haven’t found a specific use for them.

Facebook

It’s all the rage. It seems to be all some people (Kawasaki, for example) can talk about right now. I’ve even signed up. Like, less than a month ago. And let me tell you what—I pretty much have no idea why I should use it. It really is just a collection of the same activities that I do elsewhere. I mean, as a blogger, do I need Facebook?

What is the only thing I’ve really done with Facebook? I’ve added a few apps to my profile. I’ve added the Twitter app, last.fm app, Flickr app (though I can’t get the damn thing to work right)… but I link to all of those profiles from my blog footer, too.

Facebook wants me to update my status. I already do that with Twitter. Worst part is that Facebook wants me to go to the site to update everything… and read everything. Sorry, no RSS. Sorry, but I really don’t go to websites anymore. (Also wish LinkedIn provided updates to your contacts via RSS, for the record.)

Facebook also feels anti-open, anti-standard, etc. For example, I have no idea how I would even link you to my profile. Could it really be “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=544839151″? They can’t do any better than that? How about Facebook.com/adarowski? No? Why not?

As you can see, I’m underwhelmed. About all it is good for is the groups features (which I don’t even use because there is no RSS… so maybe it’s not all that good) and the last.fm widget rocks if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have my music or the last.fm app installed. As of now, I can only envision using it if it somehow crushes LinkedIn and becomes the #1 site for business networking.

Pownce

Pownce is a really cool technology that some compare to Twitter. As Brian points out, they should not. I simply haven’t been able to use it for anything because it seems that where it differs from Twitter is that it is great for small working groups. For example, if we didn’t use Skype at work, Pownce would be a great option. But we don’t, so I don’t use it.

I’m not saying it is bad. In fact, it is quite attractive and well done. I just don’t have a use for it yet. If it had beat Twitter to the streets, we’d all be using Pownce. But it didn’t, so it needs that extra use for people to adopt it.

So there you have it.

Those are the social networking apps I use. As you can see, I’m not much for the networking part, go figure. Gimme value immediately and you’ll suck me in.

No, the fact that I’m blogging at 4:30 isn’t the only way you can tell I’m a new baby’s daddy. Hey wait, why am I blogging at 4:30 in the morning and not sleeping? Well, I just put Nolan in the swing (the only place he wants to sleep tonight) and I’m giving it a few minutes before I commit to actually getting some sleep for myself. He has a knack for waking up right when my eyes have been closed for 90 seconds.Anyway, another way you can tell there’s an infant in the house is the recent spike of Travis listens on my Last.fm profile. Why Travis? Well, it goes back to when Ella was born. Travis is one of the few bands that both my wife Erin and I truly adore. So, when Ella was in utero, she would bypass Mozart or Beethoven for Travis. Interestingly, when she was born, the opening chords of Travis’ “Sing” was the only surefire way to make her stop crying.

Now, Nolan didn’t listen to Travis in utero. Yet, still, when he’s upset the first thing I do is put on “Sing”. And dammit, it works. There is something about that band—no, more specifically that song.

(Hold on… glad I didn’t sleep… the boy is waking…)

Back… he’s going to try eating. Again.

So, in addition to the Travis increase, there is also an uptick in all things Ben Gibbard. Ben not only does some solo work but also fronts two very successful bands, Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service. Ella has graduated from Travis to Ben. She loves him. She requests his stuff in the car, often followed by comments like “wow, that was a good song.” I’ve considered taking her to see Ben (acoustic show, of course).

Another noteworthy artist sits at #4 on the chart above—Steve Burns. Know who that is? I bet you do. From his Last.fm bio:

Steve Burns first gained mainstream recognition when he became “Steve” in the children’s show Blues Clues. When he unexpectedly left the show, rumors spread quickly and globally. A lot included being admitted to drug rehab centers and even dying. None of them are true. Burns left on his own as he felt he had finished with Blues Clues and wanted to pursue other interests.

While writing songs in college after the show, Burns met with music producer Dave Friedmann, which lead to a collaboration with The Flaming Lips’s multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd on an album, Songs For Dustmites and released in the summer of 2003.

Let me tell you, it is a fantastic album.

Anyway, it is quiet in the other room, so I’m going to try to add to the 2 1/2 hours of sleep I got a while ago… now that the sun is coming up…

I love this social media stuff. But how much of it do I actually practice? Well, a decent amount as a blogger, I suppose. But I’m quite light on the social networking side of things. I don’t have a ton of friends lists all over all sorts of sites. I don’t have a MySpace, Virb, or Facebook page. Why is that?

I figure it is because I tend to use social media sites for my own convenience, not for the purpose of networking. In fact, I like the “collective intelligence” angle a lot more than the networking angle.

For example, I don’t use del.icio.us because I want to make friends. I use it first and foremost because I used to use three machines quite a bit… and many browsers on those machines. I hated not having synced bookmarks. What I actually used to do is put my bookmarks on an HTML page on my server. That way I could always navigate to them. Enter del.icio.us—now I just save them to my account and access them wherever I want.

But del.icio.us has this cool feature that allows you to see how many people have bookmarked a page. Click on that and you can see how they saved it… what tags they used… descriptions they left… etc. An example I like to give is that if you see someone tagged it as “inspiration”, you can—with one click—see what other pages have inspired that person. If they are into the same stuff as you, this can really help you find relevant content. This is collective intelligence.

I’ve never gone as far as saying, “wow, this dude has wicked cool bookmarks—he’s gonna be my friend.”

Another example is Flickr. The other day, I was looking for a nice photo of Trot Nixon to use on a forum. While searching the entire user base for photos tagged “trotnixon”, the one I actually ended up using was uploaded by one of my Flickr Friends.

I don’t use Flickr too much for the collective intelligence though… except around conference time. I use it for my own storage and really keeping in touch with people I already know via their photos. I’ve added people as Flickr friends after meeting them… generally not before (using the term “meeting” loosely here… I have friends I’ve never met).

Side topic: I hate that when you add someone as a Flickr contact you have to decide if they are a Friend… or just a contact. I realize there are some permissions-based features that go along with that, but gosh… I don’t want to add someone as a contact just to have them add me as a friend and then be like… WTF? That jerk? Also, I don’t want to add someone as a friend and then have me just be a contact. Then I just look needy…

So, I’ve never searched Flickr and thought “wow, she has sweet photos—she’s my new friend.” I had never done that on ANY site.

Well, until now.

I have gushed about last.fm since my buddy Nick got me to join. Now I adore it. I love the collective intelligence side of it. Just about every time and artist I haven’t heard in a while comes up on the shuffle, I command+tab over to the last.fm.app to see how many scrobbles (plays) that artist has. Generally, you’ll get some in the tens of millions. The really indie folks are under a million, generally. Every once in a while you get someone below 100k or even (gasp!) 10k. Lowest I’ve seen for a band that I listen to just like I would any other band (like, not friends of mine or something) is Calendar Girl, clocking in at a lackluster 287 scrobbles. In fact, I was their #2 listener last week (with a whopping five plays).

Last.fm is like fantasy football for audiophiles. Every Sunday, instead of checking out Tom Brady’s yardage, I’ll check and see what I listened to over the last week… who rose up my charts… who moved up my Top Artists Overall chart. Last.fm has a friends feature that lets you easily see what they’re listening to. I added Nick. Once I listened to enough music to allow the algorithms to make a good judgement, last.fm told me that Nick and I have “Very High” compatibility rating on the Taste-o-meter.

However, once I listened more, last.fm also presented me with “Neighbours.” Neighbours are not friends. They are the people in the system who have the musical tastes most similar to you. Think about this. Imagine if the whole world scrobbled their music listening. Imagine if you could find that one person in the world with taste just about exactly the same as yours?

Well, even if everybody in the world did this, I think I’ve already found mine. Sparky232221.

This one’s just plain freaky. Just about my entire chronic music-listening life, Teenage Fanclub has been my favorite band. They’re a Scottish quartet (well, three guys with revolving drummers over the years). They are my #1 artist on last.fm. They are Sparky’s #1. Another Scottish outfit, Mogwai, is my #2 artist. They are certainly my favorite among highly active bands (TFC is in the latter stages of a brilliant career that used to see them much more prolific). Mogwai is Sparky’s #3. Who’s Sparky’s #2? Why that would be Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo—who happen to be my #4. The only thing keeping us from having the same artists in our Top Threes is my obsession for The Arcade Fire lately (Sparky has The Arcade Fire at #30).

Not only is Sparky my #1 neighbor, I’m his. In fact, I’d like to see the algorithms results. He is so far ahead of my #2 it is not even funny. I introduced myself to Sparky (maybe we’ll call him Mark because—well—that’s his name) on his shoutbox with a ” Wow… holy… you have fantastic taste in music. ” We keep an eye on each other’s charts now. It’s cute. It’s fun.

But finding that other person that is so freakily like you it is scary is not just bout “cute” and “fun”. I recently had the chance to do a teenie tiny amount of work for a Cambridge, MA startup called PatientsLikeMe. Their service does kind of the same thing, but for a far more noble cause.

PatientsLikeMe was started when Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS. His brothers rallied around him, shocked by how little was being put into finding a cure for this terrible disease. Jamie Heywood became a “guerrilla scientist”—leaving no stone unturned to try to get to the bottom of the cause. Stephen Heywood, with friend Jeff Cole, started PatientsLikeMe.

PatientsLikeMe is a networking site for patients of life-altering diseases. It started with ALS and, in March, expanded to include multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. PatientsLikeMe allows patients to track their progress—weight, treatments, symptoms, how those symptoms were effected by the treatments, dosages, etc. All of this is then fed into an algorithm which shows them—here’s where the name comes from—patients like them. People going through exactly what they are. So much for feeling like you’re alone when you are faced with something like this.

Jeff and Ben are fantastic people and I’m watching the site closely to monitor their progress. Social media isn’t just all about meeting new friends. It can really be about changing your life—connecting you with people (not just information) that you never would have been able to discover before.

Essentially, the reason why the web was built.

I just started using Last.fm yesterday.

“What?” you say. “What kind of self-respecting Web 2.0 kid isn’t using Last.fm?”

Well, for a while, I wasn’t. I love me my music, don’t get me wrong. I have 6600 tracks in my iTunes Library. I like to crank it with the rest of ‘em. But my music has been stored on my home eMac which is generally not connected to the web often (you need your machine to be connected to take advantage of Last.fm). Since I so often listen to podcasts to and from work, I generally only have a very few albums on my work machine at a time. So, I was never in a situation to get much out of Last.fm, so I didn’t use it.

Well, my new MacBook Pro affords me the ability to add some music to the work machine. So, I copied over about 2700 tracks in the last couple days of my very favorite albums (I know, that’s a lot of favorites). But over 425 alone are Teenage Fanclub and Yo La Tengo. And that’s not including all of them. So, it adds up quickly.

So, what does Last.fm do? When you are web-connected and listening to music, you run the Last.fm app and it records what you are playing on iTunes (I’m sure it works with other music-playing apps, but seriously… what others are there?). It then uploads that data to the Last.fm server. You are able to view charts of your recently played tracks and artists as well as tracks and artists played over time.

But like any hip Web 2.0 site, Last.fm “harnesses the collective intelligence” of the users in order to provide additional features. The first, of course, is a similar artists feature. This isn’t an arbitrary music critic choosing who he thinks is most similar. Actual listening patterns are determining the suggestions.

How is this different than Pandora? Pandora allows you to select an artist or song and it then serves up similar music—as determined by the members of the Music Genome Project. You can guide the recommendations by giving a thumbs up and thumbs down, but you are really going by what the Genome Project thinks. Last.fm builds the entire recommendation system totally based on what you listen to.

Another feature is, of course, a friends feature. In fact, if you visit any profile of a user, there is a “taste-o-meter” that shows how compatable your musical tastes are with that person. For example, here’s me rated against my pal Nick:

Every time you visit an artists page, it also shows the top listeners to that band. I find it interesting to poke around and see who people’s #1 artist is. I love that Caterina of Flickr has Mogwai as #1.

I found Last.fm pretty interesting because I’m working on a couple projects that specifically deal with software-generated recommendation systems. One of them I’ll be writing about on the CogBlog soon, and the other… perhaps I’ll be able to write about it down the line. But Last.fm has been more than just handy. It has inspired some ideas of how to handle these serendipitous recommendations.

If you use Last.fm or decide to sign up, here’s my profile.

Update: Just noticing that some of those tracks in the image in this post were listened to when I was not connected. So, it tracks your offline plays and uploads when you connect. So, I could have been using it all this time! D’oh!