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.