New Profile Options Coming And Media Pondering

This is a bit of a rambling post on a varitety of subjects, the lack of official music channels in Second Life, a new messaging feature via web profiles and some strange claims by Linden Lab over premium features, I’m blaming the hottest end of September since 1895 for this rambling!

As some of you may have noticed, I’m a bit miffed about the whole Spotify now requiring new users to have a Facebook account, largely because I think this is absolutely ridiculous. However where I do think Spotify have made a sensible choice is in making their offerings available to Facebook users. This may sound contrary, but it really isn’t, my criticisms of Linden Lab pushing Facebook have been due to Linden Lab seeming to push Facebook our side, pushing Second Life Facebook side makes perfect sense.

However the deal does raise the concept of media, Second Life is a place that is ripe for media, music, videos, live performances, they are all popular within Second Life and for bands looking to make a cheap promotion, Second Life seems a reasonable cost solution and yet, we don’t see much of it. However this brings me to another gripe, which is the lack of a decent API for advertising events, I love the showcase widgets we can create, I’d love to do the same for Events or get a  feed of some sort of events strream with a nice level of richness, but it’s not available.

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The Function Creep Gains Pace – Spotify Join The Evil Empire

When people ask why people are concerned about real names rather than pseudonyms or talk of people not having to use a service, it’s all well and good, but as I’ve stated before there’s an underlying function creep going on and into that murky water comes Spotify.

The free music site recently struck a deal with Facebook, first of all this means more piddling about with Facebook settings, but there’s something really bad about this deal, if you’re not a Facebook user you won’t be able to signup for Spotify. No new accounts can be created unless you have a Facebook account.

Ah well what’s the problem, it’s free? Well no, you can pay for extra services with Spotify and even if you want to become a premium subscriber, you will still need a Facebook account to signup, which quite frankly is an absurd requirement.

Spotify aren’t the only people to have gone down this route, the virtual world Kitely still has the ridiculous Facebook requirement, whereas TechCrunch, the tech blog, still have Facebook comments. However at least on Facebook people can comment via AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts, although still not via Twitter. TechCrunch really should know better.

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