FlyFi Developer's Blog

Embrace the chaos: You tube and free music streaming

posted by Eric Eaton on Oct 18 2008

Not two weeks ago we decided to integrate YouTube videos into our player. It felt a little like dropping out of school the day before graduation to follow some illusive muse on an road trip to an undisclosed destination where "great things will probably happen"

Not to belabor the road trip metaphor, but so far the ride is exciting.

It turns out that a large number of YouTube queries, formatted as "Artist name + Track name" will return videos that mostly match what you would expect. This is interesting because of what it means for streaming media. If you can live with the additional video component (and I bet you can), YouTube is the unanticipated king of free streaming music. What made Napster so powerful (and potentially lethal to the music industry) was the ever growing base of users contributing content. YouTube is like a grown-up, std-free Napster.

Just the sheer volume of stuff getting posted to YouTube has ensured that as far flung artists as Lars Vegas, Billie Holiday and Pinetop Smith are available for your listening pleasure. Expect the list of tracks to grow with each newly minted garage single as their fans start posting to YouTube.

Which brings me the chaos issue. There's always (read "often") the chance you'll get a video of lurching Christmas Trees when you search for Pinetop's Boogie Woogie, (actually, you will get the right song, but you know what I mean). Well, walk into a crowd and ask for a lift, and someone might hoist you into the air and pass you over their heads; but that's kinda fun too.

Neutral Voting

posted by Eric Eaton on Feb 28 2008
How much Granularity should we give track voting? Versus how simple should the user experience be?

The answerer: I don't know
If I get a list of recommendations containing 15 tracks, and I tell Goombah I like 5, hate 5 and have no real feeling about 5, Then Goombah can use all 15 tracks to calculate the next batch. But if I can't tell Goombah about the 5 I'm neutral about (that's how it currently works), then what should goombah do with those 5 tracks?.

Currently you'll get those 5 tracks back in the next set. But a no vote could be treated as a neutral vote.

But I've seen enough people using Goombah who ask for a "don't know" button; it makes me think -- it's more about a persons discomfort with polarized voting about anything.

Every time I take a test of this nature, about half way through I begin to feel uncomfortable with all my votes, because I start to wonder what the consequences of my vote will be.

But, then one more button can be as much barrier as utility. I've been trying to err on the side of simple.

Of course, going with the Google model, give the user one button and give them exactly what they want right after it's clicked. That'll happen in the background. In the mean time -- is it 3 buttons or 2?

Seeking of Simpler, Button-free Interfaces...

posted by Eric Eaton on Jan 28 2008
...what about Killer recs, aka Headless Goombah? In the Spirit of mind reading, why should the user jump through an extra hoop (albeit a small one - wait big hoops are easier...) just to get recommendations from the big catalog?

the spirit of distributed architecture, shared computing and all that, it seems kinda cool that the client can be used for intensive calculations. While Pandora has tons of time to match the next song to your preferences (the old fashioned radio model buys them time while they dole out tracks in 3 minute increments) Goombah wants to give you 20 tracks at once. So, a little extra (local) computing power is helpful. Thus the JNLP via button.

The only way to make this less of a hoop os to automatically run Headless, which seems uncool.

Wait, there's another way to reduce hoops -- do it ALL on the server. So much for shared computing. Okay, we'll try that. In the mean time, press the button, it opens up the recommendation process in a big way.

But Napster Doesn't Suck

What happened to the days when being online was synonymous with being well informed (that never was true). Sometimes I think the republica smear machine has been push polling internet users since 2004 (perhaps the Heritage foundations is training it interns). I can hear it now; "How do you feel about rumors that Napster executives recently ate James Hatfield's new born baby?"

I've been using Napster to sample full tracks (get with the program iTunes) for the last 90 years. It's html/flash. It's free. It's platform agnostic. So what's the problem.

fear to fear

Okay, maybe it isn't the Heritage foundations fault. But I'm pretty sure it's the RIAA's fault. That whole bru-ha-ha around peer to peer music sharing, with the lawsuits and the yelling and throwing of poop; people are really afraid that clicking a button with Napster is going to open a direct link to the RIAA's legal department.

It's not peer to peer anymore. There are actually tracks out there, legally available for on-demand streaming. That's right, the Web really is a wonder place to play.

Sure I'd like to keep people in Goombah while they sample tracks, and someday soon we'll do just that. But think of all the music discovery you'd miss out on if you didn't try the Napster samples in the mean time.

of course, there's always that guy (I actually interviewed him in a UI test) who say "I don't like what Napster did to Metallica, so I'll never use them" If I've told him once, I've told him a thousand times "Grandpa, that was a long time ago. It's time to move on."