I have been thinking about this for some time now, and theres another quite interesting discussion started about "[url=http://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=1060]the way you like[/url]" in which I confirmed the "watch" button will appear sometime this year.
Let me go over a few thoughts and aspects to explain what I have in mind at this point, especially thinking of possible effects of having the "watch" button.
Right now, you are already watching things with your newsfeed: The people you follow, and your own tracks (if you have remix notifications enabled).
As some people have correctly pointed out, using these features leads to less attention on new members contributions, since you are being "fed" enough tracks on your newsfeeds.
Now the "watch" button on tracks comes into play. By clicking it, you are asking to get notified whenever there are additions to this track, regardless of the user who ads - so chances are you'll get some unknown players appear on your newsfeed. That is great!
Secondly, the watch button ads a new way to enter the collaboration game:
Right now, a new collaborator will have a relatively small audience: Those who are currently online and are checking the "latest jams", and a few users who may receive a remix notification (which only applies if new users don't start by sharing templates, and which may also be compromised if the remixed users are not frequently online).
Now, if one encouraged the new users to remix tracks which are watched by many, and which are not too old, one could increase the number of attention towards the new participants this way.
The "watched by X users" statistic could actually become very relevant in classifying promising collaboration tracks.
I can imagine some will say "but any track on wikiloops is a potential collaboration track!", but seriously, that is not true.
Some tracks are either complete, or too crowded for further collab, too experimental for the average visitor, or the sound does not leave much hope this will turn into a fantastic collab... and I believe few people will click the "watch" button if any of this is the case.
The only aspect I'm not quite sure about is the "unwatch" option...
Let's play it thru:
- you get a newsfeed message:
"Track XYZ from your watchlist has been remixed:", followed by the standard newsfeed player display.
- you open the player and check the new addition, then I can foresee three possible desires:
1. you decide to do nothing - and keep watching for remixes of your watched track
2. you decide its time to stop watching the track because this is the 43th bass add you are presented, so we'll need a button to "un-watch parent track"
3. you may feel like "wow, this is the addition I had been waiting for, now lets see what comes next" - then you would basicly like to watch this track instead of its parent, right?
I'm really a bit concerned people might be flooded with "watchlist alerts" at some point,
but I'm not sure this can be solved programmaticly - if you choose to follow 500 users or watch all tracks, don't complain about your newsfeed getting too crowded - it remains in the users hand.
I have to add that this is something the brothers at facebook would disagree about... but that is another story.
Let me end with a special thanks & credit to DannyK for being the first to bring up the idea of watching, and to Gastric for the explicit and good think-along, keep it coming ;)