Viraj's Weblog

There's a good article by Nat Friedman at the end of this month's Linux Journal. A quote:

There's a difference between software that is usable and software that is a pleasure to use. Until you watch people using your software, it's hard to know how well you're doing.

I remember reading in Discover magazine about some company trying to design technology to analyze commonalities in a music database and predict what a person will like. I don't know know if this is from the same company, but Pandora seems awfully close to achieving this.

A friend pointed it out to me and I think I'm already hooked. Normally I listen to Shoutcast streams, which was rather difficult to find consistent music that I liked on any station. Pandora seems to generate personally tailored stations. I wonder how they are achieving this, because I can imagine it requires quite a bit of bandwidth to play so many streams, growing linearly with the number of users. I wonder if these seemingly unique streams are actually shared among many listeners.

Regardless of how they do it, it's very cool. It has consistently predicted music that I like. I don't think I'll be listening to Shoutcast streams anymore, for popular music at least. I'm not sure if I can get any drums and bass from Pandora .