Kicked out of Orkut? Done with all these social networking sites that just hook you up with friends? I mean, an attractive, smart, well liked person such as yourself already has all the friends that they need. But what about your music?
SongBuddy is a friending site with a cause: to hook you up with good mp3s. The premise is pretty simple: you add your buddies to your list of buddies and you add links to mp3s on your Catalog. You can browse your buddies’ music or just hit play and listen to it all. Rinse and repeat until you’ve found the Next Big Thing. Check out my profile on the site to get an idea of what’s going on.
Where do these mp3s come from? The way the recording industry is acting, they’d like you to think that mp3s are illegal. But smaller, independent labels know that mp3s are the best way to get the word out which is why they put them on their sites for you to listen to. SongBuddy lets your friends point you to the good stuff.
So get on SongBuddy, get your Catalog going and get the word out!
(Thanks to all the friends who helped test it out and offered suggestions and reminded me that I had to still keep building it. And thanks to David for the design I butchered for the site.)
For the geekier among you, here are some tech specs:
The site is running on the LogiCreate PHP application framework. As I wrote before, it’s a breeze to program for. You’d do well to check it out and figure out how to make a module.
The site supports some pretty nifty things, like RSS for keeping up with your buddies’ songs. It also exports your user profile and Catalog in FOAF format. I’m working on reading external FOAFs, once that is going you’ll never need to add your friends once the next social site flavor of the week comes along. Hooray for open formats!
Speaking of open formats, to play the music the site generates an m3u file which lists the URLs for the songs in the Catalog or Buddies List that you want to listen to. Your media player will take care of the rest. iTunes for Mac users might want to read “How can I get iTunes to create a new playlist when I click Play””
All the data on the site is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license so if you think you can do something cool with the data, I’d love to hear about it.
3 responses to “Announcing SongBuddy Beta”
Nice. I’d heard for years from many people that someone should put together something like this, but this is the first time I’ve seen it implimented.
Oh, btw there is a an issue in IE 6.0 with the header background image. I tried saving a copy of it on my local machine, and fooling around with it, but I couldn’t get it to show up. Perhaps it’s either the relative path, or IE doesn’t like to to do background images using GIFs? Anyways, if it’s still after work I’ll see if I can find a fix, as long as that’s alright.
Yeah, I just saw it on IE 6 and saw the break. I was surprised it hadn’t been mentioned, but then I looked at my stats and only 6% of users were using IE which means I run with a pretty geeky crowd 🙂
SongBuddy
If you’re sick of what the radio (particularly Clear Channel stations) has to offer, and you’re looking for some new artists to refresh your palate, check out SongBuddy. SongBuddy was developed by the witty and creative George Hotelling who also…