Sam Davyson

I’m glad to hear it! I use this religiously and I recommend it to everyone.  I wish they’d get the dropbox.com domain though. If you join using this link we’ll both get an extra 250 MB.

The technophile column in the Guardian gives the Spotify mobile app a very positive review. Points out that you can share Spotify accounts by forcing offline mode. Doesn’t really elaborate much on the major downside of no background playing (iPhone only). My review is still on the way.

A neat tool that I’ve been using for a while to generate random passwords for online services. Works really well in every case unless there’s also a desktop or mobile client involved where you can come unstuck not knowing your password. Worth looking at.

This is a very nice looking Google Map with Twitter trends put over the top. Lily allen is all the rage in London clearly.

I know this is an old app, but it have just recently added Guardian crosswords and so I’ve got it. It’s fantastic.

I saw Lissn’s presentation at the TechCrunch 50 conference on the live Ustream feed. I was interested. It seemed to be a realtime chat service with a focus on listeners (“lissners”)

SIGNING UP

I signed up for an invite soon after watching the webcast, and a few days later (yesterday) I was emailed an invite. Today anyone can sign up on the website for an account meaning that the invite system was remarkably short lived. I wonder if this was intentional or if they found that enough people hadn’t signed up for invites to make the service feel busy and they wanted to get more people in.

From receiving the invite signing up was a 5 step process. Click the invite link. Fill in two short forms. Check your email for a link. Fill in a captcha. And – boom – you’re account has been made. I’ve put this to the founder of Lissn as not being a particularly good way to go about things and he’s agreed. So lets leave this – you make an account. Now what?

WHAT IS IT FOR

According to the homepage:

Lissn connects friends, locals & the world through live, real time conversations. Become a part. Join for free!

I wonder what that means. It sounds like Twitter doesn’t it? But maybe with a better interface for conversations rather than the @reply system which is confusing at first. Maybe something like quotably? (RIP). Having looked around the service I think that this is fairly accurate. Lissn is about the exchange of short messages – but it’s new feature is that messages are organised around conversations. It’s all realtime but the conversation has a permalink so it doesn’t have to be realtime.

So can you spot the difference between this product and any forum where you can create threads?

The answer is incredibly not much. It updates without you refreshing (available on lots of forums these days) and messages have to be short. So maybe Lissn is to Forums as Twitter is to Blogs. They’ve simplified the experience to try to make it more about now and more spontaneous. Personally I find the UI really confusing. Let me show an example:

A conversation on Lissn.com

First of all the image at the bottom is my avatar – that is showing that I am on the page i.e. that I’m “lissning”. What about the rest of it? So it would seem that Andrew has posted “Let’s see if it embeds…” as the starter for the conversation and then there have been four replies to it. The first one is at the bottom of the screen (by Andrew again) and then Mike, Jeff and John follow up. So far so good. It looks a lot like one tweet at the top of the page and lots of comments on it below.

However if you click the “Show Transcript” link (which is top right) a box loads at the bottom (image here) and in it it says:

Andrew McIntire: Let’s see if it embeds media… http://imgur.com/gM19g.gif
Paul Smith: spotify:track:0zZc3I2Rx1aVragXt8bYKp

Who is Paul Smith? And why doesn’t his comment show up in the main stream of things? Is it that it’s been marked as spam or something (not that it is)?

A further confusion is that if you are the creator of a conversation you seem to have the right to promote one of the comments to be a full bubble like your own original message. I haven’t had enough conversations to explore this functionality fully but I can see this is where Lissn becomes the most realtime.

WRAP UP

Lissn is a new service, and so far it hasn’t got too many users. Around a thousand at the time of writing (judging by the predictable URL structure used for profile pages). Many of these people will of course be signing up out of curiosity and not spending much time with it. With more people perhaps the utility of the site will become clearer. It is hard to think of it however as anything new.

That being said there is a planned Town Hall meeting later today which maybe will address some of my misunderstandings. This can be seen on Lissn here.

I’ve downloaded it of course, and I’ve got myself one month of premium membership in order to use the app. I’m going to try and watch my usage carefully to see if I think it’s worth it.

So far I’m hugely impressed by the app itself. More soon.