Web 2.0 Blog

Last.fm has become one of my favourite new websites of recent times. It is the first site of it’s kind - a social network with the emphasis on music. There’s something addictive about discovering how much music you listen to, and which artists are dominating your playlists. It tells you who your favourite artists are, how much you’ve listened to them, which are your favourite songs and albums, and you can spend ages just reading all the stats.

I have to announce my disappointment however at the social side of Last.fm, something which could have been great. With the ability to create groups, join forums and make friends with people who share your musical tastes, it’s very disappointing to find this aspect so greatly neglected by its users. Sure there’s a small number who make an effort, but I guess ultimately that there’s just not enough reward or purpose for the users to engage in any meaningful discussion anywhere on the site, which means once you look past the stats, you’ve looked past Last.fm.

Another issue I would like to address is that I like many others of recent times have become annoyed by the site’s scrobbling inconsistency. I’m talking about iPod scrobbling, something which most of the time it doesn’t want to do but every now and again it will. The dreaded ‘no ipod library found’ message is an all too familiar sight.

What annoys me most is that this problem is well documented, yet Last.fm have done nothing about it for a long, long time. At the end of the day Last.fm has limited uses, so what it does do, it needs to do well. This just isn’t the case. Last.fm is a unique site with the ability to do great things - it’s partnership with iTunes and Amazon is an indication of its potential - but someone really needs to get behind it and make it a more desireable, rewarding tool.

Today, one of my Ebay items I was selling was due to end after having been on sale for seven days, and literally a couple of hours before it was due to end I received an email from Ebay stating that the item had been removed from sale as a result of ‘keyword spamming’.

Apparently the use of the word ‘As New’ at any point in the title is considered  to be “using brand names or other inappropriate keywords in an item title or description for the purpose of gaining attention or diverting buyers to a listing”.

A couple of points:

• Why wasn’t this breach made more while going through the listing proceedure? Surely Ebay could invest in software which detects if these words are used, which could then automatically inform the user?
• Why wasn’t I informed earlier? This item has been on sale seven days and it had bids placed on it. They could have contacted me a long time ago which would have given me time to adjust the listing without effecting the bidders.

I know that Ebay have got to have rules and regulations and I’m sure it’s mentioned in their user agreements and policies, but when something so simple and unharmful can cost a user a sale,  instant removal of a listing with no prior warning is a poor method of managing the issue, on top of the bad usability to start with.

If you’re clearly taking the piss with a page title then fine, but I think lesser punishments and warnings would be more suitable for people who make a mistake for the first time. Read Ebay’s largely unknown keyword spamming tutorial here. I’ll not complain because believe it or not the 10p listing fee isn’t a big deal, but I thought people should know what Ebay considers ‘keyword spamming’.

I may be a bit late on this one, but about bloody time. YouTube has finally switched from 4:3 ratio to 16:9 so the masses of people wanted to upload widescreen video clips - which most video uses these days - can finally have their contributions viewed properly online. It’s strange because the likes of Vimeo have been using widescreen for ages, so why did it take so long for a multi-million dollar company like YouTube / Google to make the switch? I mean, YouTube has been going for years…

I’ve noticed that YouTube has added many new features to ist service of late, such as the captions and subtitles, annotations and endless lists of recommendations, suggestions and promotions. It’s almost like being in an online shop sometimes - but it’s always nice to see a widescreen TV.

I was recently making one of my websites compliant when I became aware that the basic code that YouTube provides users is not compliant with the global XHTML standards - meaning that my site was not fully user-friendly while it was on there.

It turns out that the W3C Validator isn’t keen on <embed> tags appearing anywhere on the page, so I did a bit of research and cam across the following replacement code which works and is completely compliant with the standards:

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”350″ data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/yourcode“><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/yourcode” /></object>

The parts where it says your code need to be replaced with the extension that applies to the location of your YouTube video - this is present in the orginal embed code and can be just copied and pasted across.

In early September, the folks at Google quietly unveiled their Google Chrome web browser, intended to make yet another huge impact upon the market.  The fact of the matter is people just aren’t catching on to the hype the folks at Google were obviously banking on.

Certainly, Google has become a regularly used word, ultimately making it a verb in the process that many people use when they mean to search for something.  This is great and all, but Google can’t expect a one-two punch with everything they create, and the beta version of Chrome leaves much to be desired.

Look at the fact that Google Chrome still only has a very small percentage of market share with users, even after being on the market for nearly two months.  Hacks and bugs have plagued the browser since its release, and the Google homepage has even stopped advertising for Google Chrome.

Many in the blogosphere feel it would have benefited the internet behemoth more to have created a plug-in to be used with Firefox, which already has a prolific amount of plug-ins, with more in the pipeline.  Google and Firefox have worked together in the past, which begs the question: why go out and try to reinvent the wheel?

Google Chrome has tried in vain to change the way we use browsers, thinking it would be more intuitive, but ultimately falling short of its aims.  It is a disappointment of great proportions for those who thought Google would certainly not put out a product with so many holes left to be filled.

Then again, it is an open-source work-in-progress, which means someone out there may just be willing to cure Google’s ails.  One just has to wonder—will it be too late when that finally happens?

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of how to become a travel agent. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com