FoxyTunes/Yahoo Deal Consumated

Congrats to Alex and the gang at FoxyTunes (and to Lucas et al at Yahoo)...

FoxyTunes Blog: "The FoxyTunes team will become a part of Yahoo! Music and will continue working on FoxyTunes, adding many great things to our products - you’ll see support for additional media players, integration with many additional music sites and services and much more! Our product roadmap and wishlist are quite long and very exciting, and being a part of Yahoo! will really allow us to make many of the things we’ve been planning a reality. Most importantly, Yahoo! are as committed as we are to preserving the Open spirit of FoxyTunes and embracing all the great music products and services out there."

Let's hope Microsoft doesn't screw the whole thing up....

Yahoo to Snare Foxytunes?

Given what Yahoo has shown what they are up to with their new plans around music and their new web layer, this actually doesn't come as a surprise to me.

Yahoo May Be Looking To Buy Israel’s FoxyTunes: "Rumors popped up here in Silicon Valley that Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Israel-based FoxyTunes."

I mentioned in my previous post about Yahoo's new strategy reminded me a lot of Foxytunes' approach. Perhaps I was more right than I knew at the time...

Yahoo's New Play(er)

Yahoo just announced their new web player today and released it into the wild for us to play with.



Basically, it works as follows:

Here's what it does:

1. Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
2. Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. We host this, so you just have to point to our URL.
3. Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.
   

More information can be found here:

http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/post.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/yahoo-releases-browser-based-mp3-player/

My first impressions are very positive. As a blogger it will make my life easier since I just embed the player code once into the body of my page, and then just drop the MP3 links anywhere on the page and they automagically get a play icon (and get playlisted).

It also is supporting some open standards (under the covers) in the form of XSPF playlists - I assume in a future release I will be able to hit a page that uses this player and download the XSPF playlist file to take with me - where I can then decide to either have it continue to resolve to the original source files or to a catalog of my choice (e.g. a subscription catalog, my local library, etc.). Check out the work going on at OpenMediaWeb that Yahoo is also heavily involved in and this previous conversation around playlist portability.

Yahoo gets their piece by linking off to a Yahoo Search based on the metadata keywords.

All-in-all, it strikes me as a web-based client version of Foxytunes. I've always been a fan of Foxytunes, and you can see my previous coverage of them here. In fact, I would not be surprised to see Yahoo Search evolve to have "artist pages" that suck in related content from the artist from all over the web - photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, free-range MP3s (similar to the way AOL just starting doing), Wikipedia-based bios, etc. very much like FoxyTunes Planet.

The downside? Well, if you are "playing a page" you are basically tied to that page as long as you want to keep listening. The easy way around that is to open a new tab instead of refreshing the current page you are on. Not a huge deal, but you may often find yourself accidentally turning the music off if you follow another link on the page that you are playing (if that link doesn't target a new browser window/tab). The other downside that I noticed when I first implemented it, is that in a heavily widgetized page, you may have to wait a while for the javascript to load.

I speculated about 6 months ago that Yahoo was up to something based on the previous Webjay work of Lucas Gonze. It looks to have evolved a bit since then, but I think understand where the are going and I applaud it.

In honor of this new player, I've got a new Song of the Day to share too.
Thanks to Redboy I just discovered The Big Sleep. This song is off their soon-to-be-released album, and I'm diggin' it.

Pinkies - The Big Sleep

Also check out one of the instrumental tracks from their previous album.

You Can't Touch the Untouchable - The Big Sleep

FoxyTunes Update

FoxyTunes Blog: "Signatunes supports 10 additional platforms!
August 2nd, 2007

We received amazing feedback on Signatunes, with many people asking to add support for their favorite sites and services.

Today we are adding support for 10 more great services:

* Blogger
* Xanga
* AOL Blogs
* Windows Live Spaces
* Yahoo! 360
* Hi5
* Bebo
* Friendster
* TypePad
* Noteworthy mail

If you already have a FoxyTunes version with Signatunes, just go to FoxyTunes Configuration > Signatunes > Check for Updates and the new sites will be auto-magically supported."

Cool.... although in Blogger the URL doesn't automatically link (I did it manually below).

----------------
Now playing: Maria Taylor - Clean Getaway
http://foxytunes.com/artist/maria+taylor/track/clean+getaway

Twitter DJ by Foxytunes

Things have been a little hectic lately, and after read Fred Wilson's post on Twitter DJ the other day, I realized that I had forgotten to say anything about it myself.

Twitter DJ leverages Twitter as a human-powered recommendation channel. It was built by the guys at Foxytunes (which btw is a very slick little browser extension) and I was asked to be one of their “featured DJs”.

In their own words...

FoxyTunes Twitter DJ is a Twitter channel with music recommendations from a selected group of "FoxyTunes DJs".

Also, it allows all Twitter users to share their favorite songs with the community.

How do I post songs?

1. Add FoxyTunesDJ as your Twitter friend
2. Wait for a few moments until FoxyTunesDJ adds you back as a friend
3. Use TwittyTunes to post music to Twitter, prefixing it with "@FoxyTunesDJ". All music twits will appear right here on this page (http://www.foxytunes.com/twitterdj) - as well as showing up in each contributors Twitter status

Featured DJs:

Chris Messina

Fred Wilson

Jason Herskowitz

Ouriel Ohayon

Basically, when you click receive the Twitter message, they provide an URL for artists that resolve to their “FoxyTunes Planet” mashup (which pulls in YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Flickr and lots of other feeds). Also, when you visit either my DJ channel (or the aggregated channel), you can then listen to the songs I've recommended since they map them to YouTube videos. Voila... personalized radio that doesn't cost them anything to broadcast.

If this takes off for them it will generate a good number of page views for them without actually having to generate any content themselves. There is a growing trend of Music 2.0 services using freely available/licensed music videos to create "personalized radio stations". I'm not sure how this trend ultimately gets reconciled with the Streaming Radio Royalty Rates, but obviously more and more loopholes and workarounds pop-up everyday.

PandoraStrands

I love MyStrands Labs... you can always count on something cool popping up in there. I only have too complaints about it... 1.) I wish more of the things in there were integrated with the rest of the site and, 2) I wish I got alerted when new stuff popped up in there. I just subscribed to the Labs feed (and plugged it into me*dia*or too), so hopefully I have the latter taken care of now.

The latest addition is a mashup called PandoraStrands. It is a Firefox extension that integrates MyStrands real-time track-level recommendations, community and scrobbling with Pandora. While listening to Pandora, you just click on the little Muzika icon down at the bottom of the Firefox window. Up pops a window that gives surfaces recommended songs based on the one you are currently listening to. You can click on any of the recommendations to get taken to the MyStrands artist/track pages, or directly add one of the recommended songs as a seed to the station you are currently listening to in Pandora. Very slick.



You can also easily launch Napster to listen to any of the recommendations leveraging their freeplay trial. You can also quickly flip to the "Users" tab and see the other MyStrands community members that have recently listened to whatever song is currently playing on your Pandora station.

And of course all of the songs you listen to in Pandora are tracked and added to your MyStrands profile.

I've always felt like Pandora could benefit from some strong community features, and with PandoraStrands users can now get them. I'm guessing at some point this could be rolled into one of their other Firefox extensions that basically acts as a translation layer between many of the music profiling sites and provides you information on your musical similarity/affinity across different networks - for example, you can see how similar you are to someone on MySpace, Last.fm, Bebo or Friendster - even if that MySpace user doesn't have a MyStands profile. Ah, the beauty of open APIs...

UPDATE: As I think about it more, this would be exceedingly cool if integrated with Foxytunes (another favorite of mine). Really complimentary I think. Alex and Francisco... you guys should talk. :-)

Song of the Day - "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

Everyone has been raving about the new "musical", Once (courtesy of Moviefone). Not only is there buzz about the movie, but the soundtrack as well. I just realized (after watching a review on Ebert & Roeper) that Glen Hansard is the lead singer of the Irish band, The Frames (courtesy of Foxytunes). I'm a big fan of his voice. Check it out for yourself...

TwittyTunes

Another cool addition from our friends at Foxytunes...

TwittyTunes - Post your tunes to Twitter using FoxyTunes, and more...: "TwittyTunes is a FoxyTunes companion Firefox extension - it allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter. As a bonus, you can also post the websites you're visiting, videos you're watching and more!"

You should be able to see it in action on my sidebar. I'm listening to The Shins from Rhapsody.com, it is inserting it - along with a tinyurl link to Foxytunes Planet - where you can click and then see a bunch of related content from/about The Shins from YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.

Unfortunately, the link isn't clickable from the Flash widget, but if you click through to my account on Twitter, it is clickable there.

Foxytunes Planet (Beta)

I like Foxytunes. It is basically a little universal player shell - it embeds controls for one of virtually any media player client of your choice (Winamp, WMP, iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Engine, etc.) into your browser. It started off as a pure Firefox extension (hence the name), but the have recently introduced a version for IE too.

It's nice in that it gives you quick access to your controls from the application most people have open all day... their browser. The Foxytunes guys then started pulling together some cool mashups based on what you are listening too (one click to Lyrics Search, Amazon, and others).

Well, yesterday I got invited into the beta for Foxytunes Planet - which basically pulls all of this information into a single destination - and positions itself as a music search platform.

You search for an artist, and you get a page that surfaces:

• Photos from Flickr


• Videos from YouTube


• Artist Radio from Pandora


• Similar Artist and Fan Radio from Last.fm


• Related Artist info from Last.fm


• MP3s as aggregated by The Hype Machine


• Albums from Amazon


• Search Results from Google


• Catalog on Rhapsody.com

Optionally, you can add other widgets to each Artist page including

• iTunes Links


• Yahoo Image & Music Links


• eMusic Links

So, while you are listening to a song, you click the "Planet" icon in the Foxytunes browser tool bar and it will spawn a window with all of this info about the artist you are listening to.

In that way, it is similar to Sleevenotez, but unlike that application - it doesn't suffer the lag time introduced by waiting on a data roundtrip to/from Last.fm's servers. Give it a shot and let me know what you guys think.

Note to Foxytunes guys: Any way to create an AIM plug-in and provide the controls in my instant messaging client? Unlike my browser, my Buddy List is one of my few applications that are actually maximized all day long.

FoxyTunes - Control your music while surfing the Web and more...

FoxyTunes - Control your music while surfing the Web and more...

This is pretty slick. If you are a Firefox user, then I'd recommend it. Some nice cross-polination of client software + local/streaming/podcast content management + web search.