Kiss your online info goodbye?
One great thing that I’ve loved about the Net is that we can not only connect again with old chums but we can relive old memories and sometimes get a jolt to recall them.
One of my favorite destinations was at Facebook, which had a great application called ‘My Restaurants. which let you chronicle all the places you’ve eaten at around the country and which ones you’d like to try one day. I found out that there were dozens of NYC restaurants I liked and would return to, plus places in Boston, L.A., Miami, Memphis and Austin that I wanted to go back to or try some day. I was having a lot of fun with this- not only could I remember where to go but I also had a great list of places to recommend to friends and to go try out one of these days.
And then the application died. I was heart-broken. All the hours and days I slaved away on it, noting my favorite places and recommending to others and making reminders to go back… All gone. The page is just a blank, empty space. I wrote the developer to beg them to get it going again but haven’t heard anything. All of that work, effort and joy… lost.
And there you have a problem with pouring yourself into a site or an application. What are you gonna do when it shuts down, malfunctions or just mysteriously disappears? You’ll feel like a moron for wasting all of your time but you’ll also be devastated that all that info you were hoping to carry along with you is just gone.
So how are you gonna trust Facebook or other sites that can’t give you any guarantee about the long-term safety of your information? (not to mention privacy concerns) Do you really wanna get frustrated and hurt again? (sounds like dating, doesn’t it?) You’d be better off saving your precious info on a word processing file on your own machine and then backing it up on a CD.
That’s why I was both excited and weary when I heard about Songkick. This site lets you create a data base of all the shows you’ve been to and lets you search by artist and city to help jog your memory. I was getting all giddy about finding out when I went to this Sonic Youth concert or that Sonny Rollins show or that Al Green show. Not only that but you can also see which friends were at shows that you didn’t know about before.
But then I remembered ‘My Restaurants.’
What if I go through all this trouble and then it disappears? Does Facebook have any guarantee that all the rest of your info there won’t disappear one day and there’s nothing you can do about it? Does Songkick have a guarantee like that too? Do I wanna be a chump again? Can’t these programs have some kind of way for you to back up and save all your data so you don’t risk losing all your work and info?
Unless I can back-up my info at a site or application to my own computer, I’m gonna be kinda of weary of doing that again and so should you. Why risk the heart-ache?
Comments
We don’t have any plans to disappear just yet :)
I understand your concerns though, for instance I won’t use a productivity web-app that doesn’t have the ability to export my data, and preferably an API.
Other things I’m less worried about, e.g. Facebook. But this is definitely something for us to think about.
Comment by Daniel Lucraft from Songkick, London — June 11, 2009 @ 3:47 am
Hi Daniel,
You’ve learned an important lesson about social media- try to respond positively to any criticism of your product.
I have nothing against Songkick per se- it looks like a fun, interesting site. My beef is with the whole idea of users spending all this time to input information on sites and then maybe abruptly losing it at some point. That ain’t fun and that’s why these sites should give users piece of mind not just about privacy but also ways to save and back up their info. You might wanna consider that yourself.
Jason
Comment by Jason Gross — June 11, 2009 @ 8:02 am
So, tell me if I’ve got this wrong, but Songkick is trying to build a whole website around one feature which Last.fm already does quite well? i.e. you can track which gigs you have been to / will go to, and which of your friends went / will go to the same gigs, and you can read / post reviews etc if you want too?
Comment by Ally from Edinburgh — June 11, 2009 @ 11:04 am
Hi Ally,
You’re partially right about Last.fm- they do have a good service to let you track upcoming shows and let you keep a listing of them in your profile after the fact.
Songkick also does that but in addition, they let you build a profile of shows that already occurred- i.e. a concert you saw in 2001. I tried that with Last.fm and it doesn’t seem to let you do that.
I think that keeping a lot of past concerts is a useful feature because 1) you remember what the hell you saw and 2) see who else was there.
But the same problem with Songkick applies to Last.fm- how do you know all your data’s gonna stay there? With the founders now gone, should we put our faith in CBS to take care of that for us?
Comment by Jason Gross — June 11, 2009 @ 1:15 pm
Jason, I think what Dan means to say is that we’re planning making tools for you to keep your data—I can imagine how annoying it was to lose that list of restaurants you built up. It’s a weird and uniquely modern problem, and it would make me hesitant to contribute to another personal data website!
We’ll first start with an API, but for the non-developers among us (like me!) that might be an export to Excel spreadsheet. We believe that your data is yours, and you should be able to get it out of Songkick whenever you want. If we ever do fold (I hope not!) we’ll definitely offer our you a way to pull all that information out of Songkick. We haven’t worried about this problem yet because we’ve spent the last year building up our database of concerts in the first place, but I can see why this would make you hesitant to contribute, so thanks for raising it. That said, I hope you’ll give us a try and build up your awesome gigography!
And Ally, we’re really inspired by what Last.fm have built. By exclusively focusing on gigs, we we’ve built some cool features that aren’t available on Last.fm, like uploading your photos, videos, and posters from the gig, adding the setlists!!, and linking to all the reviews of the concert from around the web.
Also, because we’ve spent the last year aggregating tour archives from around the web, we have complete tour histories for thousands of bands, like:
http://www.songkick.com/artists/496057-sonic-youth (1192 past concerts in 350 cities)
http://www.songkick.com/artists/253846-radiohead (895 past concerts in 302 cities)
This aggregated database lets us show you cool info, like who Radiohead has played with the most often (Guess who? R.E.M.!)
More importantly, that means it’s really easy to create your gigography. All you have to do is search for your concert, and chances are we’ll have your past gig. Because Last.fm has only been around for the last few years, their past events don’t stretch as far back as ours.
Anyway, I hope you guys give it a chance. We’ve been working our asses off building it because we think it’s really cool and hope that fans will love it.
Comment by michelle — June 11, 2009 @ 1:35 pm