Facebook + Spotify do not own social music | Hacker News Reader

Facebook + Spotify do not own social music

blog.rexly.com

13 pointslautenbach10 comments

"Pull down the barriers! Share music with all your friends!"

As long as they have an iPhone. Just about everyone I know has an Android-based phone, when they have a smartphone at all. Oops.

Hi Tim. Everyone I know has an iPhone...but, yeah, it's on our roadmap. We are a bootstrapped startup so had to pick a platform to enter with, and like scores of others, for obvious reasons, chose iOS. Please don't kill us! FWIW, all services and platforms are on our roadmap, and you can still use Rexly on your laptop/desktop with similar functionality.

No one will kill you over this. If your friends all have iPhones, I can see how that could skew your perception of the world.

I would say that ends the "obvious" reasons, in my opinion, though. At last count, Google was signing up 550,000 new phones per DAY, and I'm pretty sure the installed base for Android devices is now larger than that of iOS devices.

And frankly, Android is a better platform hands down for releasing a new product that's at all experimental. Have a bug? Release a new version. NOW. A new feature to try out? Release it. And then release another build to fix that new feature.

It takes at most an hour for a new build to go live on the Market, and all of that is propagation delay. Updates on iOS take a week to go live, and that's if Apple likes you. And you haven't accidentally used pinch zoom in a way that they consider to be proprietary.

People I know who have released on iOS and Android tell me they often are 4-5 builds ahead on Android, and that they hate their iOS version because it has so many bugs that Apple hasn't approved the fixes for yet. I'm frankly surprised that a start-up would release first on iOS, given the standard "release early and often" philosophy around here.

Whatever. Good luck. If I see an announcement for the Android version, I may give it a try. I'm a bootstrapped indie developer myself, so I can sympathize with your position. But my game has been polished under the Android fan base as a first release, and only in the next month will get a full release on iOS.

I would argue that last.fm wasa first massively social music service, and it also shown that social side is not all bright. I made a few good friends there but the amount of hate and loathing in shoutboxes astonishes.

Interesting. On Rexly, it's sort of less about "making friends," although that could happen, and more about getting social cues from friends about new music to discover. Those cues are likely to be strongest from those whom you trust, and those whom you trust are likely to be those whom you know well, unless they are liars.

When you have a friendship graph and listen info, you can both match users by their taste and recommend music based on their graph. last.fm did both and more. You can also do non-social personal and non-personal recommendations based on artist "similarities" derived from correlating user tastes. Last.fm does that too.

Another thing is that social network tracks social graph, not "friends" in the narrow sense; some of people in my social graph are likely to listen to the same kind of music than I (active friends); some are likely to listen to white noise (extended family, former close friends, collegues and people I studied with). You basically need circles!

Haha, how ironic that their iPhone app requires Facebook login.

Hi Jarin. The next version (in development) will certainly allow users to log in via Twitter, and today, you can test drive Rexly without logging into Facebook, if you don't want to. The reason we did it this way (to start) is to provide a social music discovery experience with your closest friends, which we believe are on Facebook, for the most part. I hope this helps explain, for now.

The encouraging speech for the troops before the battle.

Exactly! Thanks for reading, Martin.

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