hackr.se

(Updated May 12, 2010)

This blog post is a request for comments on an idea we have for a social music player based on the Dogvibes server.  Its still just an early idea and all feedback is appreciated!

About a year ago we started our social music project called Dogvibes. It all began with a simple paper design that @gyllen wrote, initiated by the release of libspotify. We did a few weeks of hacking and got a prototype running and then came the summer and we took a break to get some sun. A few month ago we took up the work and started to finish our social music server. We now have a working server and a few different clients that look really awesome! The design is very similar to spotify but we are using a webpage to render the user interface that communicates with our server. We used this approach to develop the API in the server and now we have something that handles most use cases. The screenshots below show the user intraface rendered both in a desktop browser and on an iPhone.

Now we want to improve on the social part of playing music and develop a new client optimized to select and play music for a group of people.

When hosting a party, usually you have a computer with a media player and a big playlist where you can add the tracks for the night. Depending on the people and the amount of alcohol this can fail, some things that usually happen are:

• A small part of the group tends to pick most of the songs
• People that search for music start playing their song instead of adding it to the playlist
• Some cool dude with a unique elitistic genre tries to enforce his unknown music
• Most songs only get a 30 seconds of playtime before someone changes track

Below is a description of an idea to solve this problem, discussed by the Dogvibes developers: @brissmyr, @gyllen, @swallin, @nystrom and me (@tilljoel).

Everyone shares the same playlist where you can add your songs or vote on songs already added, the order of the tracks should be decided by an algorithm. It should work in a similar way as flattr works for micro payments. It means that adding, up voting, down voting tracks should cost you and if people up vote your tracks you receive(I have no clue what to call this “currency” yet). All users should regularly be given some amount of this currency, perhaps depending on number of songs in the playlist queue, user activity etc.

Search

Search for songs in a simple way, use same kind of browseability that spotify, lastfm or itunes has. The scope of the songs search could be limited in some way.

• Eighties party with 1000 preselected songs to pick from
• Normal party with all music found locally and on Spotify
• An espresso bar that only wanna play music from the genre “hiphop”

Users can add tracks from here to the toplist.

Toplist

This list contains all the tracks added and the current track playing. There are at least three different actions this view should handle:

• up vote a song
• down vote a song
• comment a song
• more?

The order in the playlist should be decided from some algorithm that take into account: up votes, down votes, number of tracks added by the same person and the time since a track was added.

Social

This view should reflect all actions on the server by the users, imagine an irc-like log with information like this:

We are about to start development during the following weeks and all feedback is highly appreciated!