We’ve sneaked out The Filter a bit earlier than we expected. A whole twelve hours early. You can go and have a play now.
I’ll update this blog with more information tomorrow, including news about a competition - but for now I’ll leave you with a clip from Going Live - a British Saturday morning kids TV show that I watched when I was young. I thought Gordon the gopher was super-cool.
So yes, The Filter is still in ’super-beta stealth mode’ and our team of developers are tapping away at their keyboards building/breaking/fixing things in an amusing hyper-animated cartoon style.
Here’s a rundown of what the caffeine laced coders been up to while tied to their little desks for eighteen hours a day:
New Profile Pages:
Each user on The Filter gets their own profile page where you can blog your discoveries.
For example, this morning I stepped out of my car hit shuffle on my iPod and was greeted by the plucky bass intro of ‘Don’t Lie to Me’ by Big Star. I decided then are there that every one of my friends should be aware of this little tune from the olden days of rock. It’s good news then that the development team here at The Filter have just finished building/breaking/fixing that very feature; take a look at the screenshot below for visual proof.
I’m an effort-hater - so this makes it easy to recommend music to all my friends.
If you are a beta tester then you should be able to head to your profile now and try it out. So log yourself in and head over to your profile page by hitting your name in the top navigation bar.
You’ll now find yourself in the profile area.
At the top of this page are all the special buttons that allow you to write a note about any music or movie that you want to tell your friends about. Be mindful that it is still in super-beta, aka: bugtastic.
Instant Playlists now for Windows.
Mac users have had instant playlists in their downloadable app for a while now (you hit apple + 1 in iTunes if you’ve downloaded the app) but now the Windows client can build ‘em too. Don’t ask me how to do it because I refuse to boot up from Mac into Windows. It’s wrong. They tell me it works for iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp.
Personalized RSS feeds:
You can now grab an RSS feed for any of your music, movie or web video recommendations. We’ll be opening a lot more of our data in the future, even opening up our recommendations engine - so this is the first baby step of a long walk to open goodness.
As always, feedback on this blog post, over in the forum or to our dedicated and exceptionally well-manned support email address.
I just wanted to say a massive thank you to all the people that have signed up to join the private beta program. We’ve had a great response, which has been really encouraging.
From Monday, we’ll be slowly turning on the tap and letting a lot more people into the site - so if you have already registered but haven’t got an invitation yet - there’s a good chance that you’ll get lucky this week.
There’s still plenty of time to register if you haven’t done so already.
So, we’ve been in private beta for a few days now and we’ve been having really valuable feedback from the lucky few that have been let on. We’ve also been showing a few journalists the site, and here’s some of the things that they’ve been saying about us:
“The Filter uses scary sounding maths to filter out irrelevant content and filter in content that reflects an individual’s tastes and moods across entertainment media, including music, film, web video, entertainment news and, in time, TV.”
“The Filter looks at both the content (like Pandora) and the social recommendation around that content (like Last.fm). The twist is that it will recommend music based on a movie you like, or a TV
show based on a song you like, etc. The service will ultimately be ad- supported and glean referral
fees to retailers.”
“The Filter combines together a number of filtering approaches based on purchase, listening, browsing, and rating histories. It tries to collect as much information about musical tastes as it can, both yours and other people’s—overall music purchases, your iTunes history, how you rate songs and artists on the site, and the listening habits and ratings of your friends. In a sense it combines Amazon’s collaborative filtering with Last.fm’s behavioral filtering.”
“The wild cards are that The Filter is supposed to eventually be able to connect multiple kinds of entertainment together: If you like this video clip you may also like this song and/or this movie.”
“The Filter’s engine doesn’t push people choices based on what they bought years ago. It slowly
forgets what it learned because peoples’ tastes change. Don’t you wish Amazon’s service did the
same?”
“At first blush, you’d think the website was designed to take on Google”
“There are enough folks out there, as it turns out, that are so disenfranchised by the process that Gabriel saw the need to launch his latest digital music venture, theFilter, that provides what he calls a ‘holistic approach’ to removing the white-noise of content and bringing you content that reflects your tastes. “
It has been a week or so since we’ve updated the blog, and a lot of stuff has happened since then.
First off we (finally) rolled into private beta – which means that a few selected people have been allowed to try out the beta of the site. The reaction that people have given the site has been really positive so far, which is great news. We’ve had stories in the LA Times, Mashable and USA Today and it feels good that they’re connecting with our idea and really getting the value of filtering stuff to your tastes.
Sure, things on the site are a bit slow, sometimes ugly and certainly buggy – but you can tell that it is going to be a great place to really discover new entertainment. My favourite feature at the moment is something called ‘Artist Essentials’ – where you can discover an artist and then listen to their essential songs and quickly decide if an artist is for you or not.
We’ve also been the recipient of the ‘Red Herring 100 Europe Award’ – which means that we’re officially recognised as one of the top 100 technology companies working in Europe. Previous winners have included Skype, Google, YouTube and Joost.
Finally I’d like to add that I got recommended The Pink Panther theme tune this morning in my daily music recommendations. Thank you Filter.
iTunes 7.3 introduced a problem with the way The Filter updates and fills iPods, which meant that the original 2.4 release didn’t work for some people.
Anyway - you can now download an iPod friendly version of The Filter here.
Get filling those iPods, iPhones and Apple TV’s and let us know if this doesn’t fix things for you.
One of the things we’ve been really excited about at The Filter is Facebook Applications. As you may know, we’ve already got a very simple application out there that shows your shared playlists (to install it click here) – but we wanted to create something much better.
It was important to create something that worked within the social atmosphere of Facebook. So, we’ve created an application that is far more involved – using your circle of friends as well as utilising Facebook’s mini-feed to inform your friends about your listening habits.
Although it’s still a little while off its public launch we thought we’d show you around the basics of our new Facebook application.
It’s about you and you’re friends
When you use The Filter we collect a whole bunch of information about your music collection. (privacy policy) The Filter Facebook application takes advantage of all this information and will send an update to all of your friends when you do something interesting – such as adding an album to your collection, or playing a lot of a particular artist. For example, I have a slight Morrissey obsession – so as soon as I installed The Filter on Facebook it sent out a Morrissey related newsbyte which was put in a box on my profile page and also placed in my mini-feed where it was sent out to my friends.
These news stories are also saved to a box on your profile page – so that visitors to your page will instantly get a feel for the kind of music that you listen to. Here’s a look at the box on Martin Hopkins’ profile page.
Martin is the person who originally created The Filter, and I’m appalled that he’s listened to Jingle Bells 474 times.
You can let your friends know what you think of their music tastes:
Because I’m appalled at the amount of times that Martin has listened to Jingle Bells – I’m going to tell him this by voting on the newsbyte. You can also recommend this song to a friend on Facebook, or listen to a thirty-second sample. We’re currently working on getting full songs into our Facebook app, but unfortunately this won’t be available for when we launch the application.
Take a quick look at what your friends have been listening to:
We’ve also created a way for you to take a quick glimpse at the listening habits of all your friends on Facebook. It’s a place where all the news stories about your music collection are stored. It should be a great place to sample and discover new music. Take a look at the screenshot below to see what The Filter staff have been listening to:
The Filter for Facebook
• Show your friends the music that you’ve been enjoying
• Tell your friends when you add new music to your collection
• Recommend music to your friends
• Vote on your friends music tastes
• Quickly glance at the music your friends have been enjoying
• Listen to clips of the music that your friends are listening to.
The application should be ready in a couple of weeks time : )
Today we are letting out a new version of The Filter for Mac, which addresses one of the biggest problems of the app - the user interface.
We’ve talked to lots of our users and we’ve worked out that some of you have a little trouble using The Filter, especially the first time you run the application. To solve this we’ve made some big changes to the look of the application.
Take a look at the new version of the application;
The biggest major difference is we’ve swapped the ‘F’ button for a button that now says ‘create playlist’. There’s also a little dial to the right of this, which lets you control how long you would like the playlist.
Hopefully you’ll find this version of The Filter a bit easier to use. We also hope that you’ll use more of the features of The Filter that were a bit hidden before such as the iPod filling aspect and the music recommendations from the iTunes Store.
Anyway, tell us what you think – yay or nay?
We’ve managed to squeeze out another new version of ‘The Filter’ – that not only squashes a handful of bugs that were still in the code but also adds a few new cool features.
If you’ve used The Filter for a while, you may be aware that we’ve got a version of our software for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition phones. Up until now if you wanted to install the software for your phone you had to visit our website on your phone and directly install from there.
Windows users will be please to know that we’ve now integrated this mobile software into The Filter 2.3, so if you connect a compatible phone to your computer while The Filter is open then the software can not only fill your phone with new music, but can also offer to install The Filter Mobile App.
Installing The Filter mobile app on your phone means that you’ll be able to create instant playlists on the go. There’s more information on our website.
The other enhancements we’ve made to The Filter in version 2.3 is adding Amazon to the list of stores that we can recommend music from and creating a new welcome screen that makes running the app for the first time a more enjoyable experience.
As always your feedback is more than welcome - if you’ve got any input then get in contact with us using feedback@thefilter.com
We’re very excited to announce ‘The Filter 2.2′ is available for download. The best news is that if you are already using The Filter then you will automatically receive the update when you next login.
This version includes support for posting playlists to our new MySpace widget which you can see on the right hand side of this blog.
If you’re new to The Filter you can download version 2.2 from our websiteÂ
As always we’d love to hear your thoughts about the software - just drop us a note using support@thefilter.com
,
Stuff about us.
Stories about The Filter from the web.
Stay updated on The Filter via RSS.
Bad Behavior has blocked 82 access attempts in the last 7 days.
