I’ve started trying out the sites this weekend, but too bad they both have problems…at least for now. I haven’t been able to upload a single damn album yet. The problems with both are just bugs - they’ll be fixed eventually, so maybe we’ll try this again later.

From what I can tell, Faces has the better embedable widget. Anyone can listen to the playlists and skip tracks (but you can’t rewind). MediaMaster’s widget only let’s you pause and resume, and I haven’t figured out if the song order is always random. It let’s you see someone’s entire album collection, but not listen to it—you can only listen to playlists they’ve created—really confusing.

On the flip side, when you’re looking at your own account, MediaMaster acts as an online music player (looks very similar to iTunes). You can see and listen to all your albums plus easily create playlists. Faces is really a social-networking site and the music is just part of it. Music is stored in a “locker”—you can only listen to one song at a time from the locker. The only way to listen to an album in Face is is to explicitly create playlists and listen through the widgets (”TuneFeeds”).

The othe problem with Faces is it only takes MP3 files. If you use AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC, or whatever, you have to convert them all to MP3 before upload—sucks.

In case you’re curious, or want to try it yourself and see if you get different results:

• MediaMaster fails to recognize when an upload is complete. When I try to play a song, it tells me it’s still waiting on the upload and can’t play it. Some songs work, some don’t.
• Faces’ bulk uploader just plain doesn’t work. It won’t let me drop any files into it.

It sounds like Vox is meant to be a MySpace/Friendster kind of thing that’s more blog oriented and as the laughing squid put it, “is more on a personal level, one to few vs. one to many.” And they supposedly integrate cleanly with other cool web stuff like flickr and youtube.

Blogging is fun again. With privacy features that let you control who views each piece of your blog, you’ll never have to worry about who’s reading. With hundreds of beautiful designs, you can spend less time designing your site and more time with the people you care about. Better still, Vox gives you seamless access to the web services you already use — Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and more. The bottom line: Vox makes sharing your life with friends and family easy, entertaining, and safe.

Also, if you’ve ever wondered what our friend Nick does at work…well whaddaya know, here he is to tell us.

Update: I guess you could also consider Vox a Blogger (but better) + Friendster social networking + the cool plugins already included and integrated.

Then you may be interested to know that Beck is playing at Yahoo! tonight as the entertainment for Yahoo! Hack Day—a massive geek fest, according to the squid who laughs.

Our company’s events: Order catering from Armadillo Willy’s, and if you’re lucky you get a cup of beer.
Yahoo!’s events: A big slumber party, and if you’re lucky Beck plays a private concert.

I should have gone into software and been geekier.