Last.fm has some very basic customization - for how album covers are shown, the default timeframe, and the number of tracks/albums/artists to show in a category.
Is the lack of customization a design philosophy, or a consequence of limited developer time?
One can imagine a user choosing widgets to add to their pages. Then a developer only needs to make a widget that they like - they don’t need to worry if it’s too geeky or not user-friendly enough. If others like it, they could incorporate it onto their user page.
However, I know nothing about the infrastructure of ListenBrainz.
Personally, for me although I have a ListenBrainz account I don’t use it and I guess it doesn’t have the same appeal as Last.fm.
Sure it does the tracking side of things but doesn’t really have the community, like Last.fm did - which was why when I was really into last.fm (https://web.archive.org/web/20120702042827/last.fm/user/deadevil13) in 2011-13 I liked having my widgets and bits and pieces. Of course since then all of the widget and custom HTML has been lost causing every last.fm page to look a bit bland.
Ultimately, unless there is a community side integrated into listenbrainz I cant see why I would personally bother putting anything on there - and then begs the question of, is there a demand for such a thing? I mean last.fm must have got rid of it for some reason?
Tricky. I’m sure there is demand based on the outrage among the last.fm community when things were changed over there.
That said I am not always a fan. Social sites like Bebo (we’re going back a bit here…) had a lot of customisation but were seen as being aimed at young people as a result. Sites like Facebook came out on top because they were seen as more ‘serious’ (not to mention less confusing for unfamiliar or older users).
I don’t mind last.fm’s current minimal ‘customisation’. It’s also clear that they have had to restrain themselves, as they’ve tucked some of the really cool stuff away on the new ‘reports’ page that you have to click through to:
(The tag timeline visual is SO GOOD)
I guess there is a middle ground to be found, but before looking at customizing a LB home page I would be interested in these two things:
Creating some more interesting visualisations and putting them on the reports page (there’s not that many currently)
Creating widgets that can be used on external sites (e.g. html snippets) - I think this would help build the listenbrainz audience, once LB is bigger there might be more call for custom profiles/actual traffic to profiles
Ultimately, unless there is a community side integrated into listenbrainz I cant see why I would personally bother putting anything on there - and then begs the question of, is there a demand for such a thing? I mean last.fm must have got rid of it for some reason?
If you build it, they will come
ListenBrainz will always appeal to a geekier crowd than Last FM - a geeky subset of an already geeky subset. We can try to beat LFM at their own game, but they have paid designers and we don’t. It’s an uphill battle. I’m not interested in ‘competing’ with LFM as much as I am interested in building a site that -I- want to use. And with my data-heavy background, I want some visualizations and tables that might be too much for the average user. I’m not a designer, so what I want to know is – if I build it, will I also have to make it palatable for the end user?
The v1 of this could be too user unfriendly for most people. But it could also be a great geeky visualization. So ListenBrainz needs to decide if they’re going to put that on every page, allow customization, or make a very high barrier to entry for devs who want to make new visualizations.
Brainz’ code is open to anybody (within reason), so it’s really up to you what you want to contribute. If you developed a widget system (or ‘show’ toggles?) and/or new visualisations I don’t see why they (or whatever you want to do) wouldn’t be included if they’re an improvement.
That said I personally would expect something that includes on a user page by default (assuming you don’t want to tackle widgets) to look decent at least.
On a side note, I am a designer, so if mockups of layouts/styles are useful I am happy to help
