In my recent post, ‘65 Million Reasons to be bullish on Apple,’ I brought reference to the new Genius function that was added to iPhone/iPod touch in the 2.1 upgrade.
What is Genius? Genius is a music recommendation service that mines your existing song library within iTunes to build dynamic playlists around favorite songs, and no less important, to recommend songs that you don’t own that you might like to buy.
What I did not realize at the time was that this feature is not limited to iTunes on your PC or Mac but is also built right into the iPhone/iPod touch itself.
What this means is that when you hear a song that you are enjoying listening to right now, and would like to hear “more of the same,” simply click the Genius icon in the middle of the song progress bar section (see above) and in a single click, it builds a custom playlist of related music.
It works surprisingly well, and I found myself tapping ‘next song, next song, next song…’ materially less than usual, somewhat akin to my favorite music recommendation service, Pandora.
Great feature add, and the only wish list item is for Apple to bring the function to iPhone/iPod touch that recommends songs that you don't currently own so users can discover and buy new music in the process of listening to Genius-created playlists.
A final note. More than ever, I believe that Genius can be grown to support all sorts of media, and that it’s a natural, simple, intuitive base from which to build recommendation services for photos, stories, people and products of all types, not just digital ones. While I doubt that Apple will ever provide APIs to these functions in the iPhone SDK, I can still wish/hope, right?
Related Links:
- 65 Million Reasons to be Bullish on Apple: analysis of the 'Let's Rock' event where iPod line refresh and iTunes 8.0 were announced.
- Holy Shit! Apple's Halo Effect: how Apple has turned gravity into its friend.
- iPhone 2.0 - What it Means to be Mobile: a detailed summary of my experience to date with the iPhone 2.0 platform.
