Did video kill the radio star? And will “social listening” revive it? BBC Labs have launched “Radio Pop“, an experimental social listening platform. It’s experimental and it may disappear, but the listening-tracking technology may also make its way into the iPlayer some day. At first glance its a bit like a BBC radio specific scrobbler/last.fm combination – it graphs past listens and allows you to push-button “pop” stuff you listen to, with which it then creates a reminder list.
There’s no sign of a recommendation engine – in that respect it’s clearly not trying to ape last.fm mechanics. I’d hesitate to imply that was the aim at all – it would be tough to introduce some sort of social listening site without making some of the features smell a bit last.fm-ish though!
At current – given that it only tracks live stream listening and listening needs to be done through the radiopop widget – it’s a bit of a useability step back and away from the glorious iPlayer. But the potential in future tracking, tagging and marking listens to non-live archives is clear. Socialising the iPlayer is a mere step away and represents a pretty exciting future for BBC interactive services.
Full disclosure: I work for one of the two digital agencies employed by the BBC, but have had no part in the development of the radiopop technology or strategy. My only contact with the iPlayer is production of periodic newsletters. The content of this blog does not have any connection with my employer.
And I’m posting from it now. All in all a VERY satisfying browser, and this just from impressions of the first few minutes. Four tabs open and the memory footprint is similar to Firefox, and it’s running much faster than even that browser out of the box and unencumbered by add-ons. The interface is very clean. I do miss Live Bookmarks – I’ll have to find an alternative of some sort. It handles google applications very well, predictably. Netvibes is a little worrying though; it seems to be chewing up memory at a rate of knots – 8-16kb per second adding to its stack, maxing at 64Mb.
What the comic said about being able to use the task manager to target poorly programmed web sites appears to be correct! As to whether the browser is as bad an idea as some may think, I doubt the most pessimistic of predictions. Its built in VM for Javascript is a very good idea and appears at first glance to have the desired effect. Isolation of tabs into processes is a significant improvement on previous single-threaded browsers, and though it may yet just turn into a vehicle for google services, ads, and information gathering, its challenge to the duopoly of IE and FF and its use of new techniques is a great leap forward.
The only down side I have is that it will make testing more laborious for any development once it emerges from beta (if that ever happens, given the perpetual beta of gmail and google calendar!)
Update: A security flaw (due to the software being based on an old version of WebKit) has already been discovered in Chrome. I guess there will be more… And some people have chosen to comment on the browser in the same comic form used to Press Release it.
