It’s also worth mentioning the DGT Centuar board. Uses lights to indicate moves but is a stand-alone device with no internet connectivity. Maybe DGT will use this tech for a smart board in the future?

https://www.chesshouse.com/products/dgt-centaur-chess-comput...

I've always been inspired by the story of Jamie Livingston, who took a Polaroid everyday from 1979-1997. The photos follow his life as a circus performer and photographer/videographer in NYC. He was killed by a brain tumor, and his photos follow him up until his last day in the hospital (his friends took the photos for him). Incredibly moving to see his life unfold in thousands of "in-between" moments.

http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/1979.htm#1979/1

More on Jamie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Livingston

What about Hate, Like, Love and unrated?

I always liked the idea of being able to specifically call out those few liked tracks that are a just a little more special :)

Very neat ideas here. I love the idea of helping Rdio choose what to play next by this combination of your recent plays combined popularity as defined by other users.

I also appreciate that many of the UI changes for these features are very subtle.

I just wonder how many users would actually find these features useful. I had to explain the concept of the "Collection" of a few people recently, which scared me since it's one of Rdio's core features!

Thanks for the kind thoughts!

I agree, the whole concept of a cloud-based music library is very new. Forget music, the concept of the cloud is new! I'm looking forward to a holiday filled with questions like, "where is it, who owns it, is it secure?"

Once people are comfortable with the paradigm shift, will really be cooking with gas.

Agree. Binary on/off with the stars is a lot easier to keep track of than remembering how you define each of the 1-5 star ratings.

All told, I think rating songs in your library is a really personal thing.

@JimEngland, you use stars purely as an organizational tool, which is slick. It's cool that the iTunes interface extends it self to different uses.

@tkahnoski and @zeedog, how would you elegantly expose controls for those different feelings?

In my limited but growing experience dealing with free and paid users, I see it this way: when a customer pays for your product, it's like they're saying "I trust you." When you charge for something, you are asking for someone's trust because you believe in what you've created. You owe it to yourself to make people pay for what you build.

Maybe Aladdin said it best...do you trust me? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkwMEwenaQQ)

The feature to avoid duplicates will be a huge help when importing from those other services.

It will be tough to detect duplicates from Facebook, where they recompress and strip metadata.