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Friday Reviews

Friday Reviews: Deezer.com

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How many music players are there in the world? A lot. What makes them so different? That is a good question, but even that at times is hard. Really when you think about, the primary purpose of sites like playlist.com, Pandora, (the almost deceased) lala.com and even Grooveshark.com are all the same: play live streaming music while trying to build an online community. The better question is why do we become loyal to a certain one? My buddy is in love with playlist.com, another has recommended Grooveshark to me more times than I can count. Each has their reasons for this love and each of them are valid, but telling you to love something is not my job man. My job is to play around with each of them all and then tell you the good and the bad. You decide the rest for yourself. I know, I’m pretty generous aren’t I?

Today’s entry is the french based deezer.com. The first that really stands out about this site as soon as you arrive, is the multi cultural clash that greets you. Right on the front page is a combination of sections in English, French and German, which can be confusing. I perused around for the setting and instead found a tab on the top right that diplays the flags of the host country’s language. You will not find an American flag there, but the British Union Jack works just as well.

After that was sorted, I went to task on learning the site. The navigation is pretty simple so it didn’t take me long to figure out what goes where and how. 

A little background.

Deezer is the product of French based, Blogmusik and was launched on August 24th, 2007. It was the first ever French music site to actually sign agreements with music publishers for legal music downloading. As of the most recent update in May of this year, Deezer claims to have roughly four million users and a library of seven million songs. Not bad, but the selection is mot going to be what you may be accustomed to. Here’s the good and bad…

Pros:

  • The site is easy to navigate and use.
  • The player is simplistic and does not need additional downloads to work at all, so you literally show up, search and listen.
  • You do not have to sign up for an account to go and listen to any songs either.
  • Once you do have an account, there are a bunch of features that are free to users. You can create, share and rate play lists, write reviews, share with your social media, blogs and followers within the site.
  • There are also options to put mini players with designs and personal play lists on your Facebook and blog pages.
  • Integrated with iTunes for fast purchases.
  • Easy sign up and cancel process.

Cons:

  • The music selection is geared primarily to European groups and audiences. Acts with international presence have a home (Lady Gaga, Madonna), but others are non existent (All American Rejects, Switchfoot).
  • Bands that are on do not have their full collections available.
  • All of the site details, including Help, Blog and Press sections are all in French. This isn’t a knock in anyway. After all this is a french site, but it does make the experience lackluster for this poorly educated American.

Design:

When I first hit the site, I thought that I was on an iTunes page, so I wasn’t very shocked to learn that Deezer and Apple have a connection. Much of the fonts and color schemes seem to be in the Apple family. Regardless, it’s clean enough and breaks itself down into different distinct areas. 

What I think:

Overall, I can see why the site is popular in France. There is an awesome mix of Europe’s top artist, as well as those from the US that have struck the right chord (wow that was bad.). The site is simple, but has lots of nice features for all to enjoy. The company even holds festivals throughout France, Belgium and Hungary, bringing some of that regions’ biggest artists direct to the fans.

That being said, this is definitely a regional site. Unlike Pandora, which is pretty much universal where ever you go,  Deever loses it’s luster the farther outside the French borders you are. It’s not a bad site, but it’s not for me.

Until Next Time….

Friday Reviews: Playsushi.com

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For the record, I am a geek. Not that this is surprising to anyone that knows me, but if you don’t I want you to understand that simple fact before we move on. Even though I have been running and managing people and businesses my whole adult life, the inner child in me is very predominant. In other words, I love me some comic books, summer blockbuster movies, sports and playing games online. Which is why today I am focusing my weekly review on a site dedicated to geeks like me who enjoy playing web based games: Playsushi.com

Funny enough, I discovered this site while playing on another free gaming site. It was my original intention to write a review on that one, but once I clicked over to Playsushi.com, I decided to stay and check that out instead.

Getting Started: 

The first thing you notice when you get to the main page is that there are a lot of games to choose from. Selection as you know is very important in gaming sites so that you can appeal to a greater audience. I have been to way too many site that are limited in their offering. It gets boring pretty quick.

I was personally greeted by a Batman promo screen as soon as I showed up, which of course geared me right up (Told you, geek), so I clicked on the “Play Now” button and was directed to download Playsushi’s software for free. The process was extremely simple and within a few minutes, I was playing.

 

Game-Play:

Now as you can see this isn’t XBox 360 graphics or anything, but the game-play  is effective, simple to learn and did the job just fine for me. Maybe even a little too fine actually, as my five year old promptly kicked me off to play Kung Fu Panda.

Family Friendly:

Which brings me to my next point. As I said before, there is a nice selection for all ages to enjoy this free service. Games like the aforementioned Kung Fu Panda for the little kids and slightly more detailed games like Quickhit Football for the older kids. (Like me!)

Design:

As far as the design goes, Playsushi is clean, well organized and easy to navigate. The ads on the site are all appropriate, but you have to be careful where you click or you might end up on a some sponsored site like I did. Wizard 101 to be exact. Good times. 

 

Here are the Cons:

Now there are some drawbacks to this that I want you to know about. No matter how much I may like something, I want you to see all sides.  

Nothing in this world is perfect, but somethings are just really too annoying, even for me. If you use Firefox to download Playsushi’s software, then you may get an unwanted add-on called ”PlaySushi TextLinks1.0.0”. You will know if you have it because regular text sites like Wikipedia or even CNN will have hyperlinked phrases that take you back to Playsushi.com.

Remove this at once!

There have been reports of this being dangerous malware, but there is no evidence to substantiate any of those claims that I can find. Regardless I am one to err on the side of caution, so here is the fix that seems to work: http://www.renownedmedia.com/blog/playsushi-textlinks-firefox-uninstall/

In all fairness, I switched to Chrome recently as my default browser (AWESOME by the way) and it hasn’t been there since. This is a Firefox issue apparently.

Overall:

Overall, Playsushi is a cool little site for both young and old kids alike. Outside of that pesky add-on issue there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. I won’t give it my full blessing because I don’t like the fact that you have that extra worry; but if you don’t mind and want to give it a try, you’ll probably enjoy it!

Check out more at www.theworldbyphil.com

Until Next Time….

Authentically Local