Paying Attention

Apple gets it, where WinAmp and Windows Media have failed to pay attention, that frequency and recency are the best predictors of what you'll want next.  Here's a screen collage of the iTunes interface, note the recent and most played elements.



Long before Shirky was touting the power law in blogs, we knew it govened web visitation patterns when applied to recency and frequency.  Long before that, we knew it governed human memory.  It doesn't take a lot of extrapolation to predict it will payoff in optimizing music selection processes.

Recency and frequency are the cheapest possible approaches to adaptivity and they capture a high number of motivationally charged "I gotta find it" experiences.  These are the times when the user experience is made, or broken.

Apple adds a level of explicit rating, but in a UI akin to the listen.com of yester-year, they do it with an extremely efficient and visually appealing one mouse click and drag. That's KmPKm for those of you following along.

It's a slow haul to make this happen for Mozilla/Firebird and web pages, but I'm trying over at Mozwho.
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Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: UI