Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

Back in April, at SXSW, Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) talked about the future for the company, one key theme was the understanding that they need to make sharing music easier for their users. They also didn’t want to force users to create new social networks to do so, I blogged my thoughts on Music Discovery after the event.

Just over a month later, it’s here the ‘Next Generation Spotify‘ which amongst other features allows you to share playlists amongst Spotify user and Facebook friends ‘with ease’.

One thing you might want to consider, straight after authorising Spotify to connect with Facebook, is exactly what have you allowed it to do?

As you can see, the standard set of interactions, that allow the App to post things to your profile. One new one for me is the ‘access data at any time’ option; let me know how Spotify might use that in the comments.

Usage Auto-Post
So when you’ve linked your account, it will automatically post to your wall and let people know you are on Spotify. OK So far, I’ll let the app do that.

Playlist Privacy
The app, will allow you to edit which of your playlists are publically shared (by default they ALL are), may be worth considering if you want certain playlists not to be shared. Also by default all future playlists you create will be automatically shared. Untick the box to sort that out, if you so wish.

After all, do you really want to know the contents of ‘Music to put my makeup on to’; or the fact it’s in my collection!

Facebook Interaction
So now, as we have some friends, I can peruse what playlists they have let me see. Now what happens if I decide to add one of their playlists (or one they have added), to my Spotify account?

Spotify will automatically post the fact you have added this playlist, to Facebook. There is no prompt notifying you are ‘do you want to share’ to Facebook. I was disappointed when I opened Facebook and had seen the Spotify app post a lot of messages on my behalf. Yes I had granted it permission to, but thought there may have been clearer notification within the App.

Alter Wall Posting Behaviour
If you don’t want this to happen, straight after you have Connected to Facebook with the App, hit the Cog, on the people bar and click ‘Disable Posting To Facebook’.

You will still be able to manually have share links etc, as well as being able to access your friends list.

Initial Thoughts
Some of my tweets on the subject were rather strong, due to being shocked that even though I had granted access, I was not made aware of the implication. In another post, I’ll likely look at how mflow use Facebook and Twitter integration, and see if their method is more transparent to the user, as well as appearing ‘less spammy’ to the end user.

There is some great optional implementation of sharing to social networks, just next time Spotify let me know OK? See this way looks fine to me:

This also ties in the talk by danah boyd, at SXSW regarding approaches to Privacy & Publicity; sometimes companies will encroach on whats reasonable, and then potentially take a step back ‘a la’ Google Buzz.

Some thoughts for you, please leave a comment…

• Was it clear to you what access you granted it?
• How did you react when you spotted it posting away to your wall?
• Obvious it was going to do so?
• Obvious how to stop it?

Spotted: March 25th – April 14th:

• @anywhere prototypes from the Guardian – Some interesting prototypes of the @anywhere system, as publically first revealed at SXSW, by the Guardian. Native twitter features, like hovercards, in third party sites. interesting
• 3D Interfaces – Got a set of data, with complex linked relationships. A demo of a strategy to deal with the connections when displayed in a 3D environment
• JESS3 Blog: SXSW Vicarious.ly Visualization – Amazing look at patterns and trends seen when running through location enabled data from SXSW.
• Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts – Want to create a graph? Not got a copy of Tableau. Take a look at some of the Excel templates, that are presented in a 'nice way'
• Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData – When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff – like just about everything in your life – you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

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