Google Music Trends

I just received an update notification in Google talk asking me if I wanted to automatically send my music listening history to Google's new Music Trends service. I obviously clicked No and proceeded to check out this new service.

Google Music Trends lists the most popular music that Google Talk users are listening to. According to Google:

Music Trends is a snapshot of the music that's popular right now among Google Talk listeners. Every Talk user who has opted in to Music Trends will cast their vote automatically, each time they listen to music on their computer. We'll gather this information and display the trends by country and by genre, listing the favorite songs of the most musically-active locations around the world.

Firstly, who uses Google Talk anyway?! (I do, but that's not the point :P) According to research done by ComScore, Google Talk is a distant 4th in the IM market after MSN, Yahoo and AIM and has a pitiful 1% market share. This article in the New York Times suggests that GTalk had only 44,000 unique visitors in June.

With such crappy adoption levels, I think the Google Talk team should be concentrating its efforts on improving on the client itself. Lots of work needs to be done. Compatibility with MSN and AIM would be awesome. Video chat and conferencing could be added too. There's a lot of work to be done on that front. And once that's done, i think more people will start adopting Google Talk. Until then, these guys shouldn't be wasting time creating stuff that relies on the existence of a large userbase.

Prashant.

Tech Tags: Google+Talk Google+Music+Trends