Better browsing UI

I am a Spotify customer, but not a completely happy one. I am somewhat frustrated by the UI, particularly the mobile one. I know that Spotify invests a lot in it and that people say it is one of the best but I can't help feeling that there should be better, more intuitive ways to find what you could listen for.

I tend to be stuck in my own playlists and while the radio feature somewhat helps getting out of that, I really don't understand why Spotify is unable to directly propose some music streams that match my taste. OK I have eclectic tastes and that could be a problem, as in a given session, you don't want to mix up completely different styles of music.

At the very least, Spotify could make individual song recommendations (not stream). Why aren't they proposing such simple recommendations based on what I have listened so far? Maybe because it is too weird to play one song and stop? It could perfectly go on and play something else afterwards...

In term of personalized music streams, I can imagine Spotify has tried to implement & test this but that they finally gave up since having an intelligent agent cannot fully work in a large scale considering all the use cases without being super smart.

Another thing that pops to mind is that Spotify should really have a Siri-like agent. It would easily support next/previous/pause/start commands but also: "Spotify, play something with more punch.", "something with more metal guitar and rythm", "something more noise, less rap and no voice, please". Really nice way to interface with Spotify while driving/walking/doing sport.

Forgetting about voice and thinking pure UI (which is a permanent question at my work - what is the right TV UI?), I think that the thing to explore is a graph browsing UI (infinite depth UI). I guess this is back to a standard Apple TV-type UI with recommendations on first screen and links to associated content in each detailed screen.

Or maybe what is needed is first to ask some questions to the user: how does he feel?, what does he want to watch? to make more appropriate recommendation and then provide context to each recommendation to let the user adjust. I suppose that this also has been researched and failed, meaning that it is better not to provide any context to a recommendation as it is often weird and confusing especially to unsophisticated users.

What is so special about Slack?

I am not a big user of Slack but after a friend told me yesterday that he dropped completely emails in favour of slack in his startup, I have been thinking what is so special about slack.
At the end, it seems to me that it is basically similar to emails that people classify in folders but exposing these folders directly to everyone. So the classification is done by the sender rather than the recipient. And the recipient can easily opt-in/opt-out from specific email topic.
My friend also mentioned good integration with other system such as JIRA. Something I need to look into.

Best web app ever

A full web-based audio studio:
http://www.audiotool.com/app

I don't how they did that and how it can be so efficient but we really forget that this is a web page...

ARIA

It is about accessibility but the ARIA acronym itself is not so accessible/easy to remember: "Accessible Rich Internet Applications".

I was told it can used to separate the intent/role of a widget and the way it is rendered, but actually it does not seem to be the case. A role can be defined and some extra metadata for user agents to render a page to someone with disabilities, but it is really up to the user agent.