While scrolling
through my news-feed today I came across a linked shared by someone
in this class that was a “year in review” type of web page for
Spotify. Since I'm a Spotify user myself I thought it would be
interesting to check it out. It had the basic breakdown of the music
I've listen to this year, by artist, song, genre. Aside from the fact
that my top genre was Mellow Gold (which I've never heard of before),
there was nothing particularly surprising about this. After seeing
this I got to thinking all the cool things that I could do if I had
access to this data myself. I could see how much time I spent
listening to music of each decade, or by year even. I could see what
proportion of the songs I listen to are covers. All sorts of fun
stuff, but at the end of the day I can't because I don't have access
to this data. Spotify has an API access some things, but not in the
depth I would like.
Should they? Would
people actually use something like this? Unfortunately I think the
answer to the last question is probably not.
I'm not an average
person when it comes to this type of thing, I know how to access APIs
and play with data, so obviously I'm going to be more inclined to
want that sort of thing.
In an earlier time
the twitter API was simple to use and people were doing some pretty
cool things with it. For example, people made projects that would
tweet out various things from arduinos (small cheap embedded
computers). Over time twitter has made it harder and harder for
developers to work with their API. Luckily there are still some
pretty cool services out their using the API.
Many of the sites
that we use every day are tracking us, but it's almost always to
benefit themselves. Giving users access to their own data would let
us track ourselves. Right now I can literally track myself on Google
Maps, and it's as unsettling as it is fascinating.
On March 19th
I went to a diner in Holmdel. I know that I did that, but its nice to
remember.
So what does this
have to do with Spotify's end of year music review? They both show us
neat things that we can accomplish when companies try to let users
play with the massive amounts of data that they've generated.
In some sort of CS
student paradise, all of our services let us play with our data. We
could synthesize all this data, maybe combine it with any bio metric
data if we are into the quantified self movement. We might be able to
find out all sorts of interesting things about ourselves.
There could even be
companies spring up trying to tell us all these interesting facts
about us. Sure they would know basically every detail about us to a
point where it's almost creepy, but it would be pretty nifty.
I'm fairly certain
this will all remain a fantasy, but maybe there is something to
letter users play with the data companies give to them.
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