You’ve probably already heard of the rather excellent muxtape site; well, here’s my effort. Something a bit different from my usual; in tribute to winter’s very sudden arrival in Melbourne it’s a collection of tracks that give me chills (in one way or another).
The site has a lovely interface and is a real joy to use. There seems to be a glitch with some of the timings: a couple of my tracks show up as 0:00 (they still play fine). But apart from that everything works beautifully. Even though it’s very “now” the site feels kind of retro, and not just because of the mixtape metaphor: it doesn’t (yet) have any of the social networking doodads we’ve come to expect as normal features of this kind of site. I find myself wondering how I can let people know I like their mix if I can’t leave comments? Where do I see a list of people with similar tastes to me? How do I “friend” people? Where is the ranking system, the Facebook integration, the TypePad widget? (There’s RSS, that’s about it.)
Apparently some of these things are coming, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the pared back simplicity and the fact that there are only two ways of finding mixes: following a direct link from an outside site, or clicking on one of the random links on the homepage. I’m hoping to experience a bit of serendipity; my random clicks so far have generally turned up a whole lot of indie rock but I can still hope. It would be nice to be able to leave comments, though; that’s one social networking feature I’d actually go for.