I’m blogging about this now, before I’m going to solve the mystery, so that I can look back and laugh later on.

I followed a micro-blog of a friend to the website spotify.com. I don’t know what it does, but since someone I know recommends it, I figured I might as well check it out. This is what I see when I get to the front page:

Let’s see what I can tell about the service provided by spotify, from staring at the homepage for a couple of minutes:

• It’s instant
• It’s simple
• It’s free
• or it costs a dollar for a day
• or ten dollars for a month
• it’s something to do with music
• and it’s very web 2.0 - huge fonts and rounded corners galore

Now, I’m no design maven, but as a user, is it too much to ask that this new website trying to sell me services will actually let me know first what it actually does?!

You know what, now that I think about it I’m not even going to check it out. It can’t possibly be that good.

Update: so I did end up trying spotify. It’s a net jukebox, which let’s you listen to whatever music you want using a client that looks like iTunes. The experience is pretty smooth (after you download the program from the website) but the music selection is ridiculously limited. Still, that’s totally the way music consumption is going to be, and thumbs up to spotify for making a step in the right direction.

I finally got into mapping. For starters, I’ve created maps of places I visited and of places I used to live at. The former is very incomplete (I traveled quite a lot and a lot of that as a child, so I don’t remember everything).

If you spot mistakes or omissions, or if you’d like to show me your own maps, go ahead and post a comment.

From Andy Singer’s NO EXIT.