DropPlay: Listen to YouTube Music with Your Facebook Friends
We just heard from DropPlay about their new beta social-enabled music site that calls itself the perfect streaming music service. Leveraging the power of the cloud-based applications Facebook Connect and the YouTube API, DropPlay weaves together a site that both organizes and lets you share your favorite YouTube music and playlists that you create. Unlike similar service Muziic (previously covered here) the entire experience is web-based, using Facebook Connect to store your profile and sharing data.
DropPlay describes itself as a combination of iTunes, Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. The interface is fairly straightforward, letting you search for your favorite music and watching it right away. Bookmarking music is just one click away, and organizing tracks into a playlist or sharing them with your Facebook friends is as simple as dragging and dropping the song on their name.
We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It's still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don't have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.
However, we do have some thoughts we'd like to address overall.
First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube's advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the 'milk for free,' something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.
Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.
Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend's wall. There's no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook's own original 'walled garden' approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.
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wow, this site's a worthless piece of junk lol gotta love the gmail email for the site.
to the author, youtube doesn't have adverts in their api so neither this site or muziic is breaking that. do yer homework! ;-)
this site totally disregards youtube and is another songza-type that just acts ashamed of the fact that its youtube and tries to hide it away.
Dennis, thanks for pointing out that the YouTube API doesn't support advertising at all. I guess the ball is in Google's court in that case, something they will really want to review as services using their API flourish and look for business model of their own.
I'm one of the guys working on DropPlay. Here's a quick response to Phil's post:
A) We are not trying to short change YouTube. We are not planning to make money with DropPlay, we're just a bunch of Stanford grads who built the site in our spare time. We show all of YouTube's in-video ads and would be happy to show other YouTube ads on our site.
B) We don't want to build a walled garden. We focused on Facebook Connect because it provides the most compelling social features for our users, but we plan to role out more open sharing features in the near future.
Let us know how we can improve - our goal is to open the conversation on what the ideal music player would look like. We'd love any suggestions or feedback.
Happy listening-
Chris
You guys should check out http://songraptor.com they do better music streaming actually.
Thanks for the comment, Christopher. I am glad took a minute to address the thoughts I wrote about in the post. I definitely was not trying to pre-judge your new service, I just wanted to express some thoughts I had while looking it over. And, as it turns out, I was make a bad assumption about the YouTube API so obviously that one is not on you guys at all.
I'm glad to hear you are considering some more ways of sharing new discoveries outside of the service.. I'm all for using social media tools to bring people in to the service that you love, and being able to share activities on DropPlay outside of Facebook (not that Facebook isn't enough, I guess.. haha) would be one way to do that.
It's certainly about time someone harnessed YouTube's vast catalogue of music in a social media context.
Given its existing popularity I think Facebook was definitely the way to go and certainly gives DropPlay an edge over Muziic in terms of social media. There's more on DropPlay v Muziic here: http://nextlevelideas.com/2009/03/dropplay-v-muziic-is-free-music-here-to-stay/
Chris, I'd be interested to see how you guys address the issue of load times. Is there a way that you could pre-load tracks in the playlist or even cross-fade?
Thanks,
Ben
It's certainly about time someone harnessed YouTube's vast catalogue of music in a social media context.
Given its existing popularity I think Facebook was definitely the way to go and certainly gives DropPlay an edge over Muziic in terms of social media. There's more on DropPlay v Muziic here: http://nextlevelideas.com/2009/03/dropplay-v-muziic-is-free-music-here-to-stay/
Chris, I'd be interested to see how you guys address the issue of load times. Is there a way that you could pre-load tracks in the playlist or even cross-fade?
Thanks,
Ben
It's certainly about boya time someone harnessed YouTube's vast catalogue of music in a social media context.
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