Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

When I interviewed for my current job, one of my interrogators asked me an interesting question: if Apple gave me carte blanche to pursue any project that interested me, what would I work on? My answer? Easy: social software for audio! No other project could combine my various passions (web services, audio and music, the iPod, social software, esoteric machine learning/psuedo-AI stuff) in such a complimentary way. I still find myself thinking quite often that if I was to leave Apple for anything it would be to start some sort of social music software company.

The question, though, is what should social software for music look like? I think my most important insight on the matter comes from an offhand remark someone (who I’m not sure if I should name) made to me about Odeo: that to really separate themselves from Apple and everyone else in the podcasting arena, Ev and company need to build “Flickr for audio.”

This struck me as a perceptive observation, because it squares very well with something I’ve long thought of as the first rule of social software: to really work, it must be a game. This idea was first suggested to me by Giant Ant Design’s seminal weblog post arguing that Flickr is actually a MMORPG, and I’ve noticed it holds true for all of the social software I really enjoy using. Even with the seemingly utilitarian del.icio.us, I have to admit to checking my bookmarks page once in awhile just to see how many people in my informal social bookmarking network have approved of the links I’ve posted by bookmarking them themselves.

Apple isn’t (at least that I know of) really aware of this principle yet, but the folks at Odeo do seem to understand it intuitively. I’ve already added my Odeo music podcast to the list of my social outputs I idly survey while I’m waiting for world builds at work. This also includes weblog stats, my del.icio.us page, Technorati ego searches, del.icio.us linkbacks to weblog posts, and my Flickr stream’s recent activity. Like all of those things, my Odeo podcast provides some basic ways (episode downloads, podcast subscribers, comments, Odeo rank) for me to “keep score” and know how I’m doing in the Odeo “game.”

As important as all of that is, though, I think the seed of the true killer social music app might lie in an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed on del.icio.us–something I’ve dubbed “recombinant podcasts.”

You see, while the front end of my podcast is handled by Odeo, the back end RSS feed is actually generated by del.icio.us–that is, when I want to add something to my podcast, I just upload the file to my web server and bookmark it in my del.icio.us feed, which Odeo then picks up.

Since my entire podcast is also available via del.icio.us, and the underlying files on the server are available for anyone to link to, I’ve noticed that a number of del.icio.us users have actually added songs I’ve posted to their own del.icio.us bookmarks by using del.icio.us’ “copy” feature. The really interesting thing about this, though, is that several of them (including Dom, Odeo’s cracker jack new QA lead), have clearly added them to their own podcasts (as evidenced by the “dom.net:podcast” tag Dom added in this example).

This is notable because it reminds me of another thought I’ve had about how a social music application would differ from Flickr: with Flickr, you’re selling either your skills or experiences; with a social music app (such as my Odeo podcast), you’re selling your taste. It’s therefore very easy for me to imagine a social music sharing application built on Flickr-like MP3 streams, episodes of which could be copied from one stream to another (giving rise, naturally, to the power laws, A-lists, tastemakers, and so forth that make social applications such compelling games to so many people).

Of course, all of this is assuming someone could solve the copyright problems involved. A big “if,” to be sure, which is why you won’t see me quitting my day job just yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.