Murphy's dashboard

This post is so gigantic. I'm deeply sorry.

Sharing and recommending music with friends

One of the main things that the web makes possible is sharing files and information with friends. In Songbird, this could come in the form of sharing your music files with people or by recommending music to them. I mentioned some of these ideas in an old topic. You and your friends could all have Songbird accounts (part of a spiffy Songbird social network that is), and they could show up in the service pane. I think the Social Streaming add-on mockups show it perfectly.

To share something with a friend, you would select whatever you wanted to share, be it an artist, album, song, playlist, or website. Then you could either right click it and go to "send to" or "share", or you could just drag it to a name in your friends list, and a prompt could ask you how you want to share it: it would give you the option to send the files (if your friends were currently online to accept a file transfer), or just recommend the music, and whenever your friend receives the recommendation, he or she would be able to stream it from some online service or store. You could select multiple friends you want to send it to and attach a message with it.



In this mockup, friends could be dragged or typed in the "send to" field.

To send websites like a music blog or a band myspace to your friends, you could drag a website's favicon or url onto a friend's name, or likewise, right click it and go to "send to". When someone is sent something, they could receive some sort of notification, either as a pop-up window, a non-modal pop-up, or just a notifying icon somewhere that says how many shared items are in your queue.

Collaboration

When I was reading an article about Spotify one day, I was most intrigued reading that it allows you to share and collaborate on playlists with friends. Working collaboratively with friends is a great way to be social on the web. Apart from just sending a playlist to a friend like making them a mixtape, you could set them as a collaborator to the playlists just like on a Google Doc, and then you could both add songs to it together. This could be a great way for people to make a mix together or plan out a playlist for a gathering. If either person is missing a song, it could either be retrieved from his or her friend or streamed from the web.

The collaborative idea that I am most excited about would be having listening parties with friends in Songbird. It is easy to listen to the same music with people when they are in the same room as you, but when you are far away from each other, it can be difficult to listen to music in sync without having to perform frequent count downs. People might not go through the trouble of listening to music in sync with each other manually, but if Songbird could do it automatically, I think there could be a sort of magical feeling knowing that you and a friend or several friends are listening to the same song at the exact same point. This would also be a great way for members of music fan sites to get together every once in a while and listen to an album or artist with a group of people. You could just right click on a friend's name or have an option in a menu that says "Invite users to a listening party". The person who makes it could choose if they are the "leader" - able to choose the music and pause/play it at will - or if every person will have control over the playback.

The trickiest part of this functionality would be a way for people on different computers and with potentially different audio files to listen to it in sync. Perhaps they could stream the music from a website or from one user so that Songbird could be sure they are listening to identical files, or it could just make sure that everyone's songs are the same length. While you are having a listening party, you could discuss the music with your friends in Songbird in a sort of irc-like interface, and it could show you the playlist that the group is listening to.

Songbird social pages

Finally, when someone creates a Songbird account, it would also create a profile page, accessible by clicking on friend's names, or from a web address. As has been suggested, it could be a customizable page that primarily displays your listening history, and could also feature a small blog where you could post about new artists or music websites that you have discovered. All of your play counts, song ratings, and last.fm-style tags could be stored on the Songbird server with your profile, and the best part about this would be that you could easily keep your library information synced in the cloud. This means that if you have Songbird installed on multiple computers and want to keep their playcounts, tags, and ratings synced, or if you ever lose your library database file, you could easily retrieve all of your important library information.

Maybe one day, if Songbird and Spotify or a similar streaming service teamed up, you could even load your library information into Songbird on a computer (such as a netbook) that has no music files on it, and you could stream any track from your library that is available on Spotify. Any of your artists, albums, or songs that it doesn't have could just be grayed out so that you know that they are not available.

I made a topic about having a new tab page in Songbird based on the one that is being developed for Firefox. You can see a mockup of it here.

I think new tab pages are a great way to help people get where they need to go on the internet. It could especially be interesting in Songbird because the page could help people access and find web pages related to music, such as lyrics and tabs to songs, and recommended streaming music. Unfortunately, there hasn't been news about progress on the Firefox one for a while, so hopefully it will pick up again and then it will be easier to integrate it into Songbird.

I think Songbird should have an option for this in preferences, because it is a good idea for programs to help the user restore their sessions of the program. I don't know how useful it would be if every time you fired Songbird up it immediately started the song you were playing last time, but it could at least have the song paused where it was before so you could easily resume it if you wanted to. Then, it could also restore things like web tabs and the currently selected filters in the library.

Simon released a wonderful add-on called NowPlayingArt that makes it easy to view last.fm artist artwork while in the library: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons...

I think it would be great if tagging features in Songbird could evolve into, like you're saying, a pandora-like system that compares similarities between songs and helps you make playlists of similar song. Maybe Songbird could have an open, online music/web community (I just mentioned this in the Spotify thread) and users could submit song information like rhythm, tempo, mood, timbres, things like that, to an online database to create a sort of open music genome project (this talks about the not-open music genome project that powers pandora).

The tagging-by-color idea has been mentioned a little in this topic too. I think it is a great idea.

That was a really interesting article. I love reading about cloud computer stuff too. The greatest hour and twenty minutes of my life was watching the Google Wave developer preview video (in case you've never seen it: click click). I can't wait until the basic media player features are coded and done for Songbird, so maybe the team will be able to work on more innovative web and social features. For example, I thought it was neat when that article said that in Spotify you could share playlists with friends, and even make them collaborative, like a Google doc. I posted a topic once with ideas on sharing music, playlists, and web links with friends in Songbird, and I think that those sort of things could really change what music programs are capable of. Like you said, it could sort of mix web media with local media and allow you do share them in the same ways. I bet the social streaming add-on is still getting worked on and will evolve into this. Watching these things unfold is just too exciting.

Maybe one day Songbird could even make an open web community, sort of like an open last.fm, where people could have profiles, view their listening history, have music blogs, make their own stations... Maybe they could even get deals with labels like last.fm and spotify and allow people to stream and share music that's not in their library. – Murphy, on August 07, 2009 15:24