Music community site MOG launched a 2.0 version of their site today. We previously covered MOG in our roundup of social music services, and when they launched an embeddable music player.
The core MOG service is a client application called Mog-o-matic that monitors what music you listen on a variety of media players. That’s paired with personal music profile pages where you can blog about the music you like and find recommendations for new songs from users like yourself. Recommendations are either based on the bands you manually add to your collection of artists you listen to or gleaned from Mog-o-matic.
MOG’s core functionality is still there, but they’ve reorganized and added some new features to make the site appealing to non-members.
The new design has brought order to chaos that used to rule the main page by categorizing posts by type and content along with a new personalization tool called the “Magic Button”. To make it easier for non-Moggers to surf the site, posts are now tagged as music reviews or news and segmented based on whether the post includes audio, video, or just plain text. The new “Magic Button” lets you apply a personalized filter to any content on the site based on your Mog-o-matic music profile.
The video section also includes a really cool YouTube hack called MOG TV (competitor iLike has a similar feature). MOG TV consists of all the YouTube music videos for a given artist. It reminds me of MTV back when they used to actually play music videos. You can filter which of the 400K of indexed YouTube videos play based on artist, the music preferences listed on your profile, friends preferences, or the Magic Button.
MOG is most similar to Last.fm, with it’s journal feature where listeners can make blog posts about any band. However, MOG has made user generated posts the focus of the site, with music recommendation secondary. Last.fm focuses on their music recommendation software, with user generated content secondary. iLike, recently hit over 500K users.
it’s a great news for me man!
it still looks like someone took a big doo-doo on some old brown corduroy.
How do they compare to last.fm?
And are they subject to the same new fees as say a Pandora, or is this more tracking than radio? If so, could be good for them.
Decent Idea; horrid,design –
– rb
still think uPlayMe is a better service. Obviously biased.
i don’t know how this thing will compete with last.fm. the design of this site is horrific.
i am not sure how you come up with the fact that ilike has anything like a mogtv feature. am not biased and think that the new design of this site is amazing.
I’m also not exactly sure why MOGtv was compared to what ilike has. MOG and ilike having similar video features is the old news. MOGtv’s nothing like anything ilike has. It’s akin to a TV channel that is customizable to your tastes with zero effort. In fact it’s so effortless that it’s addictive!
Hmm. I like the design of the site! At least it doesn’t look like every other web 2.0 shiny white site out there. I agree with Kevin, MOGTV is totally different than iLike’s offering.
I think MOG has a great look…like miss katherine, I too am not to hip on the trendy 2.0 look. IMO nobody has a feature like MOG TV that I am aware of, I don’t think iLike’s video feature can really be compared.
Keep it tasty,
Luke
Until these music sites get involved in their own production, I don’t think they can a hold a candle to our site (musicplustv.com) in terms of bringing users exclusive content. Aggregating is cool, but any site can do it.
Have to agree on the design.
It’s very cool.
Forget that white background, organe/green/blue/red 2.0 boring stuff- you know one design, you know all.
Mog has the guts to have a distinct design. And thus appeals to indivualists.
MogTV is great stuff.
similar button idea to streakr.com
really, good design?
there is nothing distinct or individualistic about this design. its recalls the man faults of myspace if you as me. cramped and hard on the eyes.
Mog’s look and feel is easily customised – they have a number of skins to choose from and if you’re handy with CSS, it’s possible to design your own unique ones. In this aspect, it’s quite a long way ahead of the likes of Last.fm, FineTune or iLike. Ultimately, as long as it’s possible to find what you’re looking for, the visual design of a site is down to personal taste. In my very brief, initial look at Mog TV, there didn’t seem to be any sound on the video I watched. When I clicked through to YouTube it worked fine. There didn’t seem to be a volume control on the Mog site – this was on Firefox and Safari, on the latest version of OS X. I’ve yet to work out how useful this feature will be compared to just searching for your favourite artist directly on YouTube or using a service like FoxyTunes Planet which aggregates all sorts of web-based info into one homepage.
I’ve been trying to try MOG since Sunday. Its been hell.
Never received a confirmation email so after awhile I gave the “forgot password” link a shot….it did send me an email with a link I could use to log in. Still no confirmation email. Sooo..every time I want to visit the site, I have to request a password change. And now only less than 1/2 of those emails are received.
MOG-O-MATIC is working but after (finally) scanning my whole collection…there’s only one widget working.
Tried to crop my picture…no go. Redirected to an Ooops-like page
3 emails to support for help and no response…..
I like the idea…but the execution so far in my book is one of the worst I’ve seen.
dang…forgot to add one more gripe…lol…
It’d be nice to at least be able to read MOG forums…but nope…must be a member. I could have been using this time to scan the forums for people with similar problems but I can only check when logged in. I posted in their forums about the problem but haven’t been able to log back in (still waiting for a password reset email) to check.
I won’t give up last.fm b/c I like all the stats but they did fail at the commenting/posting/social part of the deal. MOG looks like they’ve picked up on that…too bad I can’t play yet.
(yeah, I know I’m whiney. I’m a whiner. Deal.)