Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Cool Music Interface Explorations

It seems like the music tech scene on the Internet is bursting with potential these days. Unfortunately, I've been so distracted with other projects that I haven't had a chance to do all the crazy cool things I want to with Fathom… I keep telling myself I'll get to it soon, but, well, so far that hasn't happened. There are sketches in my notebook, but not much else.

The good news is it hasn't stopped other folks from taking some of the same ideas and running with them. At least I get to see them in action, right?

For instance, I wanted to do a kind of group DJ/party/jukebox thing where everyone collaborates to make the mix we all listen to. Well, someone has made that:


I also wanted to make a service that would watch your social feeds for links to music recommendations and give you a “music inbox”. Yup, someone has made that, too:


Here's another one I at least got around to writing up (well, in terms of books): an easy way to share music recommendations without having to know what service your friends use for streaming. Sure enough, someone's made it:


Of course, they're not quite exactly what I would make, so maybe I'll still get around to playing with those ideas, but in the meantime, it's great to see all these explorations happening! I mean, if I'm not going to get around to it, someone should.

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posted by Ian Gilman at 10:00 AM  -  0 Comments

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Interchange Alpha

So, I've been hacking on the bookmarklet idea I mentioned a while ago (for getting between sites for a specific book or album) and I've finally got something together I'm ready to share. It's still quite rough, but please give it a try and let me know how it works for you!

You can find it, along with instructions, on this page.

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posted by Ian Gilman at 10:00 AM  -  1 Comments

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Book Page Interchange

The "Amazon to Seattle Public Library" bookmarklet is pretty spiffy, but what if I want to go the other way? Or how about from Amazon to Goodreads, or WorldCat to Bookmooch? That's going to be a lot of bookmarklets...

What we need is a single bookmarklet that you can activate on a book page on any of these sites, and it'll pop up a panel with buttons for all the other sites. Well, there are hundreds of book sites, so we'll just do the top 10 or so and then maybe have a "more" option. Perhaps you can specify which sites go in your top 10. Anyway, clicking on one of those buttons takes you to the same book, but on that other site, simple as that. Now you're never stuck in one site when you want to be in another.

Of course we can do the same for any kind of entity that has multiple representations across sites, such as music, movies, people, word definitions, etc. Let's start with books, though.

A related problem is when you want to send a book recommendation to someone, which site do you link to? Perhaps our service could also host extremely simple book pages with all those site buttons, plus the author, title and book cover, but nothing else. Your friends (who perhaps aren't using the bookmarklet) can then follow the link to whichever site they prefer. Give these pages supershort URLs, and you've got a twitter-friendly, site-agnostic way to share book recommendations.

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posted by Ian Gilman at 10:17 PM  -  0 Comments