We’ve just activated a much discussed new feature on Phish.net. With the recent introduction of official streaming of Phish concerts, the request to track shows you’ve “couch toured” began to bubble up, prompting us to finish a feature discussed but never fully implemented.

Awhile back, we added the ability for you to track shows you’ve heard alongside the concerts you’ve attended. Almost immediately thereafter, we expanded it to allow you to track shows in your tape/MP3/FLAC collection. But then people wanted to track other shows. That’s when I started thinking that maybe there are other reasons for people to want discrete lists of shows. Maybe people want to track:

• Shows you’ve got in MP3 vs shows you’ve got in FLAC?
• Shows you’ve been with a specific friend?
• Your top 10?
• Shows you want to listen to again?
• Your favorite setlists?

The fact is, we can’t always predict how people will use features on our site. We don’t know exactly what people will want to track. So today we’re officially unveiling “Collections.” With Collections, you can do exactly what you’d expect: you can define your own collection of shows. Then, once done, you can share the collection with other people or even run stats on it. And you can keep as many collections as you’d like.

I’ve already removed the ability to track shows you’ve heard and shows you own. If you used those features, I’ve already imported your lists into your first collections. Just check your collections and you’ll have one or two already waiting for you.

We plan to expose “collections” via the Phish.net API in early 2011 and allow application developers to get creative with it.

So, without further ado: Collections.*

Here’s a demo of a collection: http://phish.net/collection/1294152220

* Please note you must be logged in to your phish.net account to use Collections.

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