Digital Design Blog

In Defense of Social Simplicity: Why Idiomag Gets It Right

In this age of microblogging and social integration, it is nice to run across a site that has a singular purpose. Idiomag, a music magazine, combines the “web 2.0″ mentality of community and integration, with the clear focus of creating a personalized music magazine.

So what exactly is Idiomag?

“Idiomag is a high-quality, digital magazine personalized to your interests in music. It keeps you “in the know” about the artists and genres you love, while helping you discover new music. With articles, reviews, galleries and interactive features in a rich magazine format, you can access idiomag whenever and wherever you want it.”

In summary, Idiomag is a magazine that gathers your tastes from other music sites such as Last.fm, Pandora, mySpace, and iLike, among others. It then compiles a magazine tailored to your personal interests. The magazine includes photos from Flickr, video from Google and YouTube, and articles from various industry magazines, besides streaming music.

You could say that Idiomag’s competitors are Last.fm, Pandora, and other social music sites which have saturated the market. However, Idiomag’s approach and design make it stand out above the crowd. While you are looking at pictures or reading an article music is streaming. Videos and pictures are embedded into the magazine “pages.” If you are watching a video, the music mutes until the video is finished or stopped. It is really such a simple concept, but the user experience is so seamless and enjoyable that you don’t even realize you are “having an experience.”

The user controls work with a transparency based overlay, which include commenting, saving, and sharing items. You can page through the magazine by clicking through the pages or using the Flash page turning effect. A simple Love/Trash rating system rounds out the functionality. You can also “subscribe” to your music tastes on other sites and Idiomag will update your magazine based on ratings from those sites.

Now Last.fm has most of these features, plus others, but the interface is disparate. It reads more like a wiki that has streaming music, rather than an integrated whole. Its primary focus is people (as in everyone). Whereas Pandora reads like a hand-picked radio station. Pandora’s primary focus is getting the right match of music. Neither one of these community music sites integrate all of the fan features into a holistic package. Idiomag’s primary focus is you.

Using the magazine as a metaphor has never quite worked for me. Either companies try too hard with the magazine concept, or put in audio/video recordings of absolutely everything, or have pages and pages of articles.

Idiomag has got the mix right.