Week 6 Why MOG blows and Pandora rules

Okay, so first off you should know that different people on the team write the scripts for the various tasks, so I’m as new to MOG as you are—and it BLOWS!

I had intended to write about what I liked about MOG, especially after I read the Terms of Service agreement and thought wow, these people are cool. Yeah, you heard right, I’m pathetic enough to actually read the TOS for something, not usually but the whole tone of it was just very cool and readable.

I’m mean really, what’s not to love about a TOS that starts out:

What MOG is about:

• MOG is about community, kindness and good vibrations.
• MOG is about asking permission. That means that you should not post a picture of somebody else without their saying you may. It also means that you should not upload or download somebody else’s Content without permission nor should you encourage others to do it. You may not log onto another person’s MOG page without their express consent
• MOG is about truth. Do not lie or mislead when posting Content on MOG.
• MOG is about justice. Do not use MOG to engage in any type of criminal or tortious behavior, including but not limited to child pornography, solicitation, trafficking in obscene material, illegal narcotic distribution, gambling, stalking, building or distributing illegal weapons and bombs, fraud, copyright or patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, stalking, computer crimes, privacy violations or harassment.

Community, Permission, Truth, Justice and you have to go a whole page before you see a legalese term, “tortious” — by this time I was thinking this was going to be a pretty cool site. But here’s where the whole thing starts to blow–after creating an account, and downloading the MOG-O-Matic–which should have been my first clue–I hate having to download applications for websites–I was ready to listen to some music.

But of course I can’t listen to music–on this music site, because then if I want to listen to the full version of a song–I have to CREATE ANOTHER ACCOUNT THIS TIME WITH RHAPSODY!! And this is where I stopped, but one can only assume that the next logical step is downloading the Rhapsody player, or real player, or whatever–its been a long time since I explored Rhapsody.

So setting aside the fact that their website is busy looking and filled with so much junk I don’t know where to even start clicking to begin exploring, there’s all this download this, and now download that. I mean what does the MOG-O-Matic do, and why did MOG ask me to download it? After all, I would have to do all of this for each of the computer’s I listen to MOG on–the work PC, the home desktop PC, and the notebook PC–can you say hassle?

There seem’s to be a disconnect between the hipster guys that wrote the Peace and Love TOS agreement and the corporate guys who dreamed up this much rigamarole before you get to listen to a song.

Moving on to Pandora, Finetune, and Last FM.

Pandora–I love Pandora and have been listening to it for years. I even met Tim Westergren, the founder at the EMP once. Simple, eloquent, nothing to download, web based so I can listen to it on any PC. And you don’t have to be a music freak to find good music. Just type in a song or artist and you’re listening to music in seconds. Sure there are limitations–you can’t skip over too many songs in an hour because it would violate the licensing agreements for the music. Oh and I forgot it works with Facebook!

Finetune–I haven’t listened to this site much, but it seems straightforward to use and the layout of the site looks promising–I might listen to this once in a while.

Last FM–I tried this around the time that I started Pandora, but it seemed like too much of a hassle–again there are downloads and a bunch of stuff I just didn’t care about. Powerful, possibly but not intuitive. I haven’t been to their site in a long time–I’ll check it out and add a comment if they’ve changed and made it simple to use.

And now, I get to go unistall the bleepin’ MOG-O-Matic grrrrr