User-driven innovation at Yahoo! Music Engine Mojo
OK, Yahoo entered the music business and stirred the market … yet, the bigger (and more interesting) story might be Yahoo! Music Engine, the service client … Yahoo opens up the API and aims to integrate those user generated innovations that will enhance the overall worth of the Yahoo music ecosystem … this is definitely a smart move …
You get YME by starting a trial subscription, and you keep the program if you bail from the service. YME might seem like just another desktop media player, but this program and its development staff remind me of early Winamp products more than anything since those bygone days. In fact the lead developer, Ian Rogers, helped build Winamp. Ian is running the plug-in development and download community with the same gonzo insouciance that characterized Nullsoft.
At the YME Plugins Site (the official unofficial Yahoo! Music Engine plugins site), the plugin development work that has been in progress since March is presented .
The range of enhancements available for this brand new client is astonishing, and the freelance developers haven’t even gotten started yet. Video playback. Multi-room synchornization in the home. Podcast fluency, including spidering and slurping. Smart(er) playlisting. Slideshows. Line-in recording. Unix command lines. New and slick library interfaces. Alternate mini modes […] Yahoo! Search plug-in. An alarm clock […] RSS playlist feeds (I mentioned this one yesterday). Library graphical data mining. Web browsing within YME [and on and on].
Brad Hill has got it right:
It’s nearly unbelievable. A major media company releasing an open-platform product in a high-stakes indsutry, developed by a team that seems to be operating with an eye-popping degree of autonomy and personality.
