I’ve been using last.fm for some time now to track what I’m listening to. I have no idea if anyone actually pays much attention to it, but it’s all handled for me in the background without my having to worry about it (as iTunes plays music, the last.fm client sends info on what I’m listening to to their servers), so I just let it go.
Now there’s a new upstart service looking to do much the same thing, in much the same way. Sign up for MOG, download a small application (on Mac OS X, it’s a system preference pane), and MOG will track what you listen to and link it to other people with similar tastes. Here’s my MOG page.
Right off the bat, I really can’t see what MOG offers that last.fm doesn’t already have…there really doesn’t seem to be much differentiation between the two services.
Save for one little thing.
Under a link called ‘Share my MOG’, you can spam notify all your friends of your new MOGspace. You can either write your own little note, or you can use the provided boilerplate text. All pretty standard — except that MOG’s boilerplate message made me cringe. Out loud.
what’s up?
thought i’d share my spankin’ new MOG page with you.
you can find it at: http://mog.com/djwudi
MOG automatically creates a page for me that lets you see what’s in my music collection and what i’m playing (and does a whole lot more). There are serious music freaks hanging at MOG. see you in the MOG-O-SPHERE. later.
Out of seven sentences (well, six plus a farewell), not a single one is actually well written. Grammarians more versed than I would be more able to point out all the problems (and probably see some that I don’t identify right off), but…yeesh. Capitalization is nearly nonexistent, dropped subjects left and right, missing punctuation, and a general disrespect for the English language.
It’s bad enough that a disturbingly high percentage of ‘net users have little to no critical writing skills (or even casual writing skills, for that matter) — do we really need to encourage this wholesale slaughter of the language?
Ick.
Yes, it’s high-falutin’, snobbish, and elitist. But damn if that isn’t enough to knock MOG several steps down in my estimation.
“00 No One Takes Your Freedom” by Beatles/Franklin, Aretha/Michael, George/Scissor Sisters from the album www.djearworm.com (2004, 5:15).
I would say that it was written in the conversational style on purpose–“thought i’d share my spankin’ new MOG page with you” sounds rather more fashionable than, say, “I thought that I would share with you my new MOG page” or something like that. Though I too am a big fan of capitalization, other than that (and that “spankin’ new” sounds strange to my ears without “brand” in front of it, though that might be some regionalism I’m not familiar with) I thought it was a decent representation of modern spoken English.
There’s a time for proper English, and a time for colloquial, and I would say given MOG’s target audience they made the right choice.
Besides, nobody likes prescriptive grammarians. :)