Having a rudimentary scoring/moderation system in place for FanConcert means that I can focus on other important areas now. What FanConcert really needs at the moment is more users, to test its limits and find new problems. So feel free to spread the word. :)

It may seem a bit funny to want people to find problems but that's exactly the kind of feedback you want on an agile software project. I like negative feedback -- it's far more constructive -- but some people, especially friends, are reluctant to give it. Strangers though, usually aren't afraid to dole out a deserved flaming or slap across the head.

But I digress... right now I'm adding social features to FanConcert to make it easier for users to communicate with each other, share their music preferences and recommend music to others. FanConcert's structured and moderated information will be the very important base that all of the social features will rely on, which is why I felt so strongly that I had to work on that first.

In hindsight I'm not sure that early introduction of some social features would have helped FanConcert in the long term, especially since they would have delayed me getting to this point with scoring/moderation in the first place. It's not a bad idea to take some time and look back and see if your 'guesses' turned out to be good ones. That might be a better way to make better guesses, it might not.

The way I see it, the number of FanConcert users had to be kept at a manageable level -- especially when I was already getting enough good feedback in terms of volume. There was no reason to expand at that point and there was also the secondary issue of possibly disappointing people with a very 'unfinished' and unpolished product. At least with my friends I could say "try this out and let me know what you think BUT keep in mind that it's not finished". In a way, I was prepping people to give the level of feedback I needed. The polish is still far from done but important features are in place to support more people contributing and moderating. I like where FanConcert is right now.

Now that the basics are in, I'd like to allow people to interact more. What kind of things would you like to see? How would you like to talk to people and share common musical interests? What kinds of social interaction are already working on other websites?

Here's where I am right now with social features: you can send internal mail messages directly to other FanConcert users.

Yesterday I added the ability to tag concerts, releases and users just like you could tag artists as "Favourite". With those tags you can make a list of the concerts you have seen and a list of the releases (albums) you have so that other users can get an idea of your tastes. These lists are linked from your profile (here's my profile).

You can tag other users as "Friend" and they'll have an elevated status for you. Recommendations (not implemented yet) from friends could carry more weight. You could block email or recommendations from non-friends. There are lots of possibilities there. The "Friend" tags could also be used to create networks (graphs) of connected people with similar interests or in similar geographic areas. Could be really cool!

I'm very interested in getting discussion boards on every single artist, venue, concert and release (and others). In fact it will probably be the next major thing I work on. People will be able to talk about anything they want there and there will probably be a Slashdot-like moderation system to emphasize good threads.

Other information websites like imdb.com and Wikipedia have this type of back-channel discussion going on. Most people probably don't even know it's there but the hardcore users and contributors use it to organize themselves and to socialize. I'd like to emulate that effect with discussion boards on FanConcert.

Anyway, this is getting long enough for now, enjoy FanConcert!