Eight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it’s becoming easy to forget what I do and don’t own.
I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of the soundtracks!
Technologies such as Spotlight make it easy for us to locate items we know we have and social discovery services such as Last.FM help us surface music we know we don’t have.
However, there’s perhaps an opportunity for personal rather than discovery services; those that perform analytics on our existing media, recommending items we already own, but have neglected or simply forgotten about…tools that help us poke around in the unexplored corners of our music or photo collections for example.
It’s not too difficult to envisage…
- extensions to iTunes that visualises your listening and creates recommended playlists of music you’ve not listened to yet, but that matches your other tastes; even unwatched episodes of TV shows you’ve already downloaded
- an adaptation of Flickr that reminds you of photos from a year ago today.
- an address book, IM network or email service that reminds you of close friends and family you haven’t spoken to in some time.
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