Mog: improved recommendations?
In my recent look at Mog, I found the social music recommendation site (gosh that’s a mouthful) good on the social and less impressive on the recommendation side. They announced the other day an improved service in the latter category, so here’s a quick look. Acting entirely in character, Mog’s new recommendations don’t just appear in a long list, but are tied to specific users:
See that round ‘magic button’ on the left sidebar? Clicking it does this, accordng to Mog:
If you are running our MOG-O-MATIC software, The Magic Button will show recommendations from the moggers who most closely match your musical taste. We can determine which moggers share your taste by comparing your collection and listening habits with those of all other moggers who are running MOG-O-MATIC.
Looking at what I thought were the Mogs’ recommendations led me to think their accuracy was way off - I’m just never likely to be a fan of Keane, Muse or The Killers. However, it turns out the default listing on display is ‘Recommendations: Last Songs Played from Featured MOGs’. So is the magic button really magic? Oddly, clicking it resulted in no change to the page: same list of featured Mogs, same songs which only changed if I chose a different breakdown e.g. top songs this month or top albums this week. This way of making recommendations just doesn’t seem very intuitive; I don’t know these people (’featured Mogs’) and it’s not clear how their tastes relate to mine. It may be that Mog requires users to be more sociable than I have been, more proactive in making friends and interacting in order to increase the accuracy of recommendations. If that is the case, this seems more of an onus than gradually building up charts by playing music that Last.fm requires.
My Mog homepage still contains a box prominently displayed at the top of the page ‘Artists you should know about’ and the instruction ‘Click edit to add some’. I guess I can safely conclude that I’m expected to add artists I think visitors should listen to - but I still think this isn’t very intuitive to new users. Overall, these developments don’t seem particularly useful, at least on initial impressions.
March 16th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I’m finding my MOG recommendations the most useful from any discovery services at the moment.
I use it to find out what albums ’similar’ people are listening to and just log into emusic and download away. This has been a top new feature and I’m glad they have brought it in.