Slash dot linked to tim o’reilly’s post on yahoo!s new web site data manipulation tool.
Definitely worth a read – i’ve never thought of the web this way before, but after trying to wrap my head around possible applications I’ve come up with my dream application. I love internet radio stations. One of my favorites is KEXP from out of Seattle. They play tons of stuff that I’ve never heard before – and that I actually like. The physical radio stations in my area fundamentally fail on both these fronts.
Here’s the problem: I hear stuff I’d like to buy later, but my memory’s terrible. I’ve got a little notepad text file that I keep writing down band names and song names in, but it’s not a very convenient format. I keep telling myself that, after the next major milestone in writing my book, I’ll put together a little SQLite database, with a nice little C# editor that I can drop on my task bar. The advantage of a database is that I could actually sort by genre, artist, album, etc. See if anybody or anything keeps cropping up. Have I mentioned I have a bad memory? I think I’ve recorded the same song from the new ex-fluke album about four times now….
At any rate, I’ve thought about how cool it would be if my little tool could also seek out cdbaby, itunes, and amazon links for me, as well as pull down information about when the album was released.
And here’s where pipes could come in.
KEXP’s has both a visual, user friendly play list page and also a play list feed.
I hadn’t thought about it before reading tim o’reilly’s article, but that feed could be used to extract the name of the song, artist, and album… couple that to a query to google, amazon, or i-tunes, scare up a little server space somewhere. And it’s good to go.
Here’s how you could generate a good pile of cash – setup a delicious like site with ads powered by google where I can swap my lists with my friends. If you want to be really cool, you can let me know what albums my friends have already purchased so I can swap tunez and check out full albums. ( I know albums. How twentieth-century. )
Now, either internet stations will have to standardize on feed-content, or each site would have to be coded individually. Even better, of course, would be to use Yahoo!s service to allow users of the sites to edit up their own feed filters.
If you get rich please remember to send me some dollars. No, really…. Thanks.
Now if only we could only convince soma to use feeds….