My mission for this year, foolish though I may be to take it on, is to explore as many of the music-based social networking sites as I can. I’ve been using Last.fm for just over a year now and am relatively if not completely happy with it. Up until summer, they didn’t seem to have much competition at all, but now there are competitors cropping up like weeds in my Kansas garden (which would be the reason I gave up on growing vegetables and resorted to large semi-invasive perennial flowers).

As of now, I’ve signed up with three other services: iLike, Reverbnation, and MOG. Actually, come to think of it, I signed up with Pandora a while ago and now that it’s gone more social I’ll have to pop back in. So today I bring you first impressions:

iLike: Very sleek simple interface. I downloaded its “bundle” and it sucked up my complete iTunes listening history in no time. The result was an instant chart that was pretty interesting to compare to my Last.fm chart since it had a few more years of data in it. It also came up with some relatively instant “people with similar taste” for me, which was nice. They weren’t great matches, but my taste is a weird enough amalgamation of things that I don’t expect great matches. I was more than a little turned off to find a provocative babe in my inbox welcoming me to the site since the staff blog pictures suggested an all-male staff. Going for the hormonal male crowd, I guess, which I am not. It’s got very cool YouTube integration, and nicely highlights where you can stream songs or sections of them. But it’s also somehow flat. It didn’t make me want to explore, it was just kind of there. And the iTunes sidebar you have to have in order for it to know what you’re playing felt invasive after a little while. It didn’t stay shut but reopened itself every time I reopened the iTunes window (even if I hadn’t quit iTunes) so I uninstalled it, which made the site considerably less useful.

MOG: Apparently this site has lots of buzz for being so social and, along with Reverbnation, it just won Mashable’s people’s choice award for music social networking site (Last.fm won the editors’ choice). I signed up about 10 hours ago and I hate it already. Why? Because I downloaded its “Mog-o-matic” plug-in that is supposed to tell it what I’ve got in my music library and TEN HOURS LATER it is still crunching away and is NOT YET HALF WAY THROUGH. I have 7500 songs in there. It’s big, but it’s not absurd. It seems to be checking each and every song against Gracenote. WHY? I’m too annoyed by this to comment on any of the other features right now (later, fear not). Plus it is slowing down my computer dramatically.

Reverbnation: I love the concept of this site with its focus on linking bands to fans in useful ways and giving money to artists. But you can only mark yourself as loving bands that have created their own presence there. Given that all the bands I love are long-since broken up or not on the site, this is rather a large barrier to entry. I can imagine that in the days of my total immersion in local music scenes and regional bands on national tours, it would have been a necessity, and I can see why the people who are loving it are loving it.

A potentially-relevant disclaimer is that I am working with Last.fm, though providing PR and remaining mum about their competitors’ strengths are not among my duties. iLike seems to be a pretty straightforward Last.fm competitor, MOG seems to be going for similar stuff, but highlighting finding new people via music rather than Last.fm’s focus on finding new music via people. Reverbnation is doing its own thing, and seems least like a direct competitor of the three.

If you’re using any of these services, I’d love to hear your impressions.