Linked List: May 16, 2011

Monday, 16 May 2011

How Good Is Google’s Instant Mix? 

Paul Lamere tests the algorithmic playlist generators from iTunes, Echo Nest, and the new Google Music. I like his metric, the “WTF Test”:

Evaluating playlists is hard. However, there is something that we can do that is fairly easy to give us an idea of how well a playlisting engine works compared to others. I call it the WTF test. It is really quite simple. You generate a playlist, and just count the number of head-scratchers in the list. If you look at a song in a playlist and say to yourself ‘How the heck did this song get in this playlist’ you bump the counter for the playlist. The higher the WTF count the worse the playlist. As a first order quality metric, I really like the WTF Test. It is easy to apply, and focuses on a critical aspect of playlist quality. If a playlist is filled with jarring transitions, leaving the listener with iPod whiplash as they are jerked through songs of vastly different styles, it is a bad playlist.

Spoiler: Google’s Instant Mix did terribly on these tests. I’ll play devil’s advocate and say that maybe this is the sort of thing that needs more time and more users to get the algorithm and song database tuned.

Dr. Drang’s TextExpander Sparktweet Snippet 

Whether you think sparktweets are a good idea or not, this is worth reading just to get your head wrapped around the cool things you can do with text-filtering scripts and TextExpander. Shame about the baseline rendering problems with certain of these glyphs, though.

Cringely on Microsoft’s Purchase of Skype 

Cringely:

Microsoft bought Skype to keep Google from buying Skype.

Notice I didn’t mention Apple. In terms of being the baddest MoFo in the market Apple has no peer, but Apple is following its own very different course. Apple isn’t the next Microsoft, you see. Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Google is the next Microsoft, so Google is seen by Ballmer as the immediate threat — the one he has a hope in hell of actually doing something about.

This is Cringely at his best. I think he’s nailed something true: Ballmer doesn’t now and never has understood Apple. He doesn’t understand what Apple does, what it aspires to, or what consumers see that’s so appealing about Apple’s products. But he understands Google, including the ways that Google’s products threaten Microsoft’s.

Remember when Ballmer made a fool of himself in 2007 by laughing about the iPhone’s prospects? That’s because he didn’t get it. It wasn’t just bluster or spin — I think he truly believed that “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” I don’t recall him ever exhibiting a similar blind spot regarding Google. That’s not to say he knows what to do about Google, just that he at least understands it.

iPhone’s Share of the Entire Mobile Phone Market in Q1 

Horace Dediu crunches the numbers, and concludes that the iPhone accounts for 5 percent of handset units sold, 20 percent of the industry revenue, and 55 percent of the profits.

NBA Team President Rick Welts Comes Out as Gay 

Dan Barry, for the NYT:

“This is one of the last industries where the subject is off limits,” said Mr. Welts, who stands now as a true rarity, a man prominently employed in professional men’s team sports, willing to declare his homosexuality. “Nobody’s comfortable in engaging in a conversation.”

How long, I wonder, until the first active player comes out?

Lodsys Patent Troll Mark Small Sets Up Blog to Explain Himself 

He claims Lodsys is asking for 0.575 percent of in-app purchasing revenue, and that Apple (along with Microsoft and Google) have already licensed the patent in question, but that their license doesn’t extend to third-party developers. We’ll see whether this pans out. (Via Lex Friedman at Macworld.)

Instapaper-Like Feature Coming to Safari and iOS 5? 

If it’s called “Reading List” and syncs URLs between devices, that’s my guess as to what it is. More here from MacRumors, and Marco Arment’s thoughts on it.