Small Tweak to the iLike Widget

One of my favorite widgets has just gotten a small face lift.  The iLike widget has introduced a couple of tabs that allow the user to toggle between recently played tracks, top bands, all time songs, etc.  More interestingly, the widget is now set to rotate automatically between these various views.

I can understand why they've made this change.  As widgets start to pack more and more functionality and content, you are increasingly seeing these widgets make use of multiple tabs.  The problem is that users are not used to looking for a widget's navigation.  So how do you show the user that there's more to your widget than one view?  You set it on auto-rotate.  Scroll down on the right sidebar to see what I'm talking about.

Comments

[Don Synstelien]

I had the iLike widget on my personal site http://cleaningupmylife.blogspot.com and really enjoyed it because of the cool nature of the interaction and content. But when I saw the updated iLike widget on my page the other day, I removed it due to the changes you mention.

Because of the new animations, I felt that instead of offering a cool insight into my music tastes, it was now a big flashy call to action advertisement for iLike. Visually, the widget now seemed to take focus away from the rest of the site where before it did not.

The great thing about this change is that it has given me some insight into how a user feels when a widget changes on them without notice. I help run a different widget service, SpringWidgets.com, so I have no questions as to who technically controls a widget file or who has rights to change it. Yet, I still found this change to be unexpected and surprising from a widget "embedder" point of view.

I suppose that if I had embedded this on MySpace instead of my blog, my reaction would not have been negative. In fact, since everything that succeeds on MySpace tends to be flashy and loud, I might not have noticed the change at all. I suppose that in the Myspace arena, this change will likely help spread the player.

Personally, I still love iLike and will be waiting patiently for the way to re-embed it without the animation.

Of course, I'm also waiting patiently for a SpringWidget version of iLike ;-) - One where I can pop it down to the desktop to have access to the dynamic "radio station" that my friends are creating on the fly without having to have a web browser open - giving me true social music sharing. Of course, I have no idea what kind of legal issues that creates.

Hopefully the developer of iLike is reading this ;-)

Cheers,

-Don

[Marc LaFountain]

I have tried the iLike and Last.fm widgets. But, I can't find anything that give me excatly what I'm looking for.

I want to be able to build a list of songs around a specific vibe/mood, have control over the ordering of the songs in the list, and be able to post the list (with album art) to a thin, one-column blog widget. Then, that widget should let users hear a preview of the song and allow them to click and buy the song via iTunes or Amazon (preferably iTunes).

iLike is pretty, one-column, and supports previews. But, it doesn't show album art and doesn't give me enough control. I want to list as many songs as I want in the order I want. I don't want to be forced to show favorite artists or recently played tracks if I don't want to. And, I want to be able to group tracks by vide/mood.

Last.fm has many of the same widget issues and the widget itself isn't very attractive.

iTunes let's you syndicate your iMixes via RSS and even provides some attractive widgets. But, those widgets also lack album art and are too wide for my needs.

I have tried the music widget built into TypePad and generally like it. But, sometimes it just can't seem to find a particular song on Amazon to link to (thus no album art displays). And, I would rather link to iTunes than Amazon.

I hope we continue to see innovation in this space. I'll have to stick with the TypePad widget for now. :-(

[lawrence]

Marc, have you checked out the Streampad widget? It at least gives you a degree of control over the songs (with a couple of caveats).

[lawrence]

Don, thanks for chiming in. I agree that there should be an option for turning off the animation. I know that Splashcast offers the same auto rotate functionality, but lets the user control whether animation is turned on or not.

I sort of went through the same thought process that you did regarding the flashiness - in fact, the new design made me think back to the flashing banners that were so popular in 1999 and 2000. However, I do like the content that is being displayed in the different views, and as someone who is currently making product spec decisions about how to display large amounts of content in a small footprint, I appreciate why iLike felt the need to animate their widget.

[Marc LaFountain]

Hey, Lawrence. Thanks for the suggestion. I've seen Streampad, but never used it. It was my understand that Streampad just knows how to play MP3s from your own blog or podcast. Is that correct? If so, I'm guessing I could get into trouble for posting commercial music (even previews) by hosting it on my own blog. Sorry if I'm just missing the point somehow. My goal is to be able to find widget that will legally link to popular noncommercial music, show album art, play a preview, and (if possible) let people go buy the music from Amazon or iTunes. Thanks!

[lawrence]

The only thing the Streampad player gives you over iLike and Last.FM is the ability to choose which songs are displayed in your music player widget. Your selection of songs is limited by those indexed by Streampad (hotlinked from blogs). And yes, the legality of it is sort of blurry.

[Derek Anderson]

I am led to believe that the streampad service was designed to allow you to stream music from your computer to a widget on your page.
I have never been able to make this function work. I think it has to do with my using FireFox.

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