2. Deezer: Deezer offers users free and legal streaming music while sharing advertising revenue with artists and rights owners. The site launched with a Sony BMG partnership and signed a Universal Music deal in 2008. Users can share their favorite music by connecting with friends within the social network, or embedding playlists in 3rd party sites.

3. Spotify: Heralded as one of the best music streaming experiences on the market, Spotify is only available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. TechDigest TV uploaded a fantastic looking preview of Spotify's much anticipated iPhone app.

4. Tunerec: Swedish company Tunerec allows users to create music libraries and playlists from recorded radio play. Because libraries are taken from recorded music, it takes a while to populate playlists; however, according to RWW's initial review by Frederic Lardinois, the service is worth the wait.

5. Last.FM: If you haven't heard of Last.FM, you've probably been living under a rock. The site offers users the ability to create radio stations and stream them complete with AudioScrobbler-powered recommendations.

6. Pandora: To the user, Pandora and Last.FM are similar recommendation-based radio services; however, where AudioScrobbler makes statistical inferences, Pandora's recommendations are determined by the Music Genome Project's 400 distinct musical characteristics.

7. Slacker: Slacker is another popular radio recommendation service. Users input tracks and receive recommendations. Slacker first launched with custom mobile hardware and has since expanded onto other mobile devices.

8. The Hype Machine: This is a fantastic service for those willing to leave music selection to the experts. Like other sites, this one allows listeners to search for music and stream playlists; however, the files on the site are actually streamed from the blogs of top labels, DJs, promoters and music start ups.

9. Blip.fm: Blip.fm is another site where music lovers can access millions of streaming songs. Members receive their own station and the ability to share station programming responsibilities with friends. The site also offers integration with blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and Last.fm. The act of blipping refers to the act of linking to a song and attaching a 150 character comment to it.

10. MOG: MOG is a music blog network that encompasses more than 300 blog posts per week. The site offers an in-depth look at new artists and includes music recommendations, videos and streaming audio clips. A good place to start with this service is to play audio from it's Recently Popular Posts page.

11. Lala: Lala also offers users a playable web browser interface. The service contains 7 million free online songs and the ability to purchase additional web songs at 10 cents each or downloadable MP3's for 80 cents and up each.

12. Imeem: Imeem is considered "the new social mixtape". The streaming music site allows users to create playlists and share them across the web. RWW recently covered Imeem's iPhone and Android launch.

13. SoundCloud: SoundCloud also allows users to upload tracks and share them via the cloud. Listeners receive shared files via an email-style interface. From there, they can choose to either play the music from the site or download the tracks they've received from friends.

14. 8Tracks: This service lets users upload 8 tracks as a playlist and share the playlist with friends. This service is essentially what Muxtape used to be.

15. Muxtape: Muxtape has transformed from one of the early mixtape-style music sites (users uploaded and shared playlists) to a directory of bands. It remains a great place to discover indie bands.

16. Project Playlist: Project Playlist indexes music from across the web. Again, users create playlists and share links to music files with their friends. Reviewers see this as one of the best music search engines in existence.

17. Skreemr: Skreemr is also a search engine and music indexing site. It claims to offer users access to "6 million mp3 files from over 100,000 web sites".

18. Fizy: Similar to the now defunct Seeqpod, Fizy is an extremely bare bones approach to streaming music with a simple search bar. Like Seeqpod, the site offers speedy music video results and audio results, and unfortunately, legally questionable content. Perhaps the site's recent acquisition will change that.

On the Horizon: Microsoft is set to launch a streaming music site at the end of July. For more info on this project check out our coverage.

Justin Ouellette, Muxtape's CEO and Founder just announced a preview version of the new Muxtape, which he has seeded with songs from twelve bands, including indie favorites like of Montral.

Artist Pages

The most important addition to the new Muxtape are the artist pages, which are currently dominated by profile pictures of the artists. Otherwise, the new Muxtape works exactly like the old Muxtape - just without the ability to create your own mixtapes.

Big Plans

In the future, Ouellette and his team plan to allow bands to sell downloads of their songs, issue tickets for concerts, and sell merchandise. For now, however, we are glad to see that Muxtape is still alive and well, though we are still sad to report that the old Muxtape won't return anytime soon.

Muxtape will effectively remain closed for the general public and will only return as a music hosting service for bands. Favtape, on the other hand, now looks like Muxtape on steroids, with embeddable playlists, album art, integrated YouTube search, a shuffle mode, and the ability to create tapes based on your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks.

While Favtape once started out as a simple Muxtape clone, this new release goes far beyond Muxtape's feature set. One of the most important differences with Muxtape is that you do not have to upload any songs to create a mixtape. Instead, Favtape lets you search for your music and add it to your playlists. To do this, Favtape makes use of SeeqPod's APIs.

Favtape does not host any of the songs itself, but solely relies on SeeqPod's index for its music. SeeqPod indexes MP3s anywhere on the Internet, which surely leaves some doors open for copyright infringement claims by the RIAA. As Ars Technica reports, SeeqPod has already been sued by the RIAA for exactly this business model of providing a 'playable search engine.' If SeeqPod shuts down, Favtape will be left without any music to play.

From a user's perspective, however, Favtape is everything one could wish for in a mixtape service, including a list of the top songs on iTunes and Last.fm, as well as iPhone support and the ability to share your tapes by email or as a Twitter message. Favtape also includes numerous social features and lets you vote for tapes you like.

While we are sad to see the Muxtape we once loved disappear, it is great to see other services jumping into the breach and building upon Muxtape's foundation. It's probably not the perfect streaming music service, but it comes pretty close. Now we just have to hope that it will not be shut down too soon.

Mixtape from http://favtape.com/frederic/RWW Test

We've seen a number of new services lately that focus on the audio in YouTube videos, but the most enjoyable one so far is Mixtube - a mixtape maker for YouTube audio. It's based on the metaphor and interface of the now "sleeping" Muxtape.

We expect the site will be operable indefinitely, as YouTube rarely comes down on derivative services. Thanks to Andy Baio for finding this one.

Popular playlist sharing site Muxtape got taken down by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in mid-August and it is unfortunately still non-operational. The fact is that Muxtape didn't pay its internet radio licensing fees. In our recent RWW Live podcast on online music, Lucas Gonze (creator of similar playlist service Webjay, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006) said that Muxtape was "trying to become a big service, i.e. get too big to fail and so cut a deal [with labels]." Unfortunately Muxtape failed to escape the notice of the RIAA.

NetShare (iPhone app)

Nullriver's NetShare was an iPhone app that, according to Gizmodo, allowed you to tether your laptop to your iPhone using the handset's 3G modem as your laptop's own. Basically this let you have full Internet access on your laptop without Wi-Fi, for free. There was talk that this violates AT&T's terms of service, but whatever the reason the app has been pulled from Apple's App Store. The last message on the site is dated 4 August and states: "We're working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore." But we're not holding our breath.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

The CLQ

Adam Steinberg of EventVue wrote in to tell us that he misses The CLQ (the acronym stands for Champions League for Quake style games). It's an app that kept track of "millions of game players (Quake, Unreal, Half-life, Tribes, etc.) on thousands of online game servers." It was a very popular app in its niche, however it was stopped. The developers claim that this was due to "incredible amounts of e-mail, GameSpy monopolizing access to game servers, constant upgrading of hardware and software to process increased traffic, games getting their own statistics, etc."

The good news for CLQ fans is that one of the developers, Nico de Vries, is currently working on a version 2.0.

PubSub

PubSub was one of our favorite 'future search' products back in the early days of web 2.0 - you could enter keywords and the product would deliver search results to you automatically. This feature is now common place in news sites, for example Google News has it, but back in '03-'05 PubSub was an innovator.

So it was a great product, but PubSub spectacularly imploded in mid-2006 after founder Bob Wyman blogged about "internal political issues". Wyman left the company shortly after and the product sunk along with its creator. Perhaps PubSub will rise again, because apparently it still exists today. Here is the message on its frontpage currently:

Others have risen since to take over the reins in future search. A few of our favorites are ZapTXT, FeedRinse and BlastFeed. We discussed those and other services here. But we'll always have a soft spot for PubSub...

AllPeers

In March we heard that P2P browser plug-in AllPeers had shut down, a blow to a market that seemed very promising back in 2006. AllPeers set out to add "file sharing to the web browser". Technically the service seemed fine, however the reason for the closure according to the company was that "we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service."

Scrabulous (Facebook app)

We reported in April that Scrabulous, the extremely popular but unauthorized Scrabble Facebook app, was under fire from Hasbro and Mattel. Those two companies own the rights to Scrabble - Hasbro in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. In July the bigcos had their way and Scrabulous was taken offline.

After more legal ducking and weaving, in which the app was first pulled in North America and then internationally too, the app got re-born under the name Wordscraper. It uses circles instead of Scrabble-like square tiles. Unfortunately the change isn't proving too popular. This comment by a Facebook user is an example of the reaction:

"I loved Scrabulous !
Wordscraper is kinda the same but I do not like the round tiles , it makes it difficult to play , kinda messes everything together, change it to SQUARES and it would be alot better."

The old version, with squares

Pandora

OK you can still use Pandora in the US, despite concerns that it might be on the verge of closing. But those of us who live outside the US haven't been able to access this lovely music discovery service for too long a time.

Qumana

Tris Hussey tweeted to tell us that Qumana was a great java-based blog editor, "easy and light." Unfortunately it is not being updated anymore and the homepage isn't accessible.

Crgslst

Back in March we reported on a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist, called crgslst. As we noted, Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind." We noted at the time that crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past.

Indeed this has turned out to be the case. Currently when you visit crglst, you are greeted with this despairing pop-up message:

ShareYourOPML

This site for sharing OPML files was "retired" by creator Dave Winer in January. He wrote at the time that "now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't."

The good news for OPML fans is that Toluu has risen to fill the void. We reviewed it in March, noting that it lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. We were impressed by the service, even more so in May when enhancements were announced.

So perhaps, sometimes, there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of web apps that close or get shut down!

Have Your Say

Tell us in the comments which web apps have disappeared in recent times that you used to love. Also let us know if anything has come along since that you perhaps like even better.

How it Works

To get Tumbltape to work, all you have to do is upload an MP3 file to Tumblr and then enter your Tumblr username into Tumbltape. If all goes well, that's all you need to do. Tumbltape should recognize the ID3 tags from your music files, but if it doesn't, you can tag your Tumblr post with 'tt:artist name - track name.'

After a very short delay, your files will appear in your Tumbltape. Starting and stopping files works by clicking on the name of the file, just like in any other Muxtape clone.

Tumbltape will display the last 12 files you uploaded to Tumblr. As you upload more, Tumbltape automatically rotates the older files out.

Limitations

One major limitation for Tumbltape is the fact that Tumblr itself only allows its users to upload one MP3 file per day. You can get around this by linking to a file that you host on your own server, or, if you have permission to do so, on any other server. Obviously, this is a far greater hassle than just uploading files to Tumblr. As Tumbltape's co-developer Adam Gotterer told us, Tumbltape is looking into ways of allowing its users to mash up playlists that are hosted on different services.

One other limitation of Tumbltape is that Tumblr's Terms of Service forbid any uploads of copyrighted material, so Tumblr itself might just cut you off if they get a take-down notice.

Verdict

Tumbltape is a nice Muxtape clone and the fact that it displays a number of random mixtapes as well as the newest uploads on its front page turns it into a more social experience than the self-hosted OpenTape we wrote about last week. The limitations put upon it, however, are severe and will deter quite a few users from really getting to use it.

If you are not a Tumblr user, 8tracks currently represents a better alternative if you just want to create a simple mixtape.

However, as Adam Gotterer explained to us, the idea behind Tumbltape was not for people to create Tumblr account just for the sake of creating mixtapes, but to aggregate the music people had already posted to Tumblr.

Because it's a self hosted program, the bar for entry is a lot higher than for Muxtape of course, though as far as installation goes, all you have to do is to copy the OpenTape code into a publicly accessible directory on your server and you should be good to go (as long as your server runs Apache, PHP5, and curl). After that, all you have to do is set a password, give your mixtape a name, and start uploading songs (or FTP them into your 'songs' folder).

Playing and Embedding

Playing songs works just like in Muxtape or any of its competitors like 8tracks. Just click on a song and it starts playing - click again and it stops.

One nice feature of OpenTape is that it provides you with an embedded player.

RIAA

As others have pointed out, part of the reason people would want to host their mixtapes on their own server is to make it harder for the RIAA to shut down a particular server, but hosting a virtual mixtape with copyrighted music could quickly become a major nightmare, as the RIAA and others would probably have no problem with serving takedown notices and asking for enormous fines.

Still, OpenTape also has other applications - bands, for example, can host their own music with it (though that is also the only service Muxtape still offers), you could use it as a podcast player, or you could just use it to promote some of your favorite Creative Commons licensed music.

Limitations

While hosting your own mixtape (just one for now, unless you install numerous copies of OpenTape) is fine, the beauty of Muxtape or 8tracks is that you can also search for other people's mixtapes, which is often a great way to discover new music.

Of course, somebody could host a central repository for OpenTape mixtapes, but then that would make it even easier for the RIAA to go after alleged copyright violations.

For some, OpenTape might fill the void left behind by Muxtape's demise, but for most, the limitations of OpenTape and the fact that you have to host it yourself will make other like 8tracks a far more attractive alternative.

Cynics will say they got what they deserved, others will ask why they didn't monetize as quickly as possible and pay internet radio licensing fees. The company says only that "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA."

We've written about Muxtape a number of times. By allowing users to upload MP3 files and build simple playlists that anyone could listen to through the austere, oversized interface, the site provided a model user experience through simplicity.

We hope that Muxtape will return, we hope that Pandora will survive, but most of all we hope that the music business can find a way to move forward with its fans so that everyone's interests can be served in this crazy new era of post-scarcity digital distribution.

What if the perfect service rose from the noise and gave you exactly the user experience you wanted? What would such a service look like?

Note: it's not clear how viable any of this is going to be if small players aren't able to compete with innovative features. If you haven't yet, read the bad news about Pandora. Justin Dorfman has a good little blog post about things you can do to save Pandora.

Assuming that the pace of innovation online in music streaming can continue, here's what we're looking for in our dream service.

Quantity and Breadth of Music

The music business fights a constant battle against homogenization and in favor of the long tail, or at least some people in it do. It's hard to judge the quantity and breadth of music on a given service, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of phenomenon.

Obviously many people want to make sure all the big hits are included, but we'd love to see the crowd pleasers be followed up with high quality music just being discovered. The infinite distribution of the web should make this a fundamentally different content experience than commercial radio has been.

Services that allow users to upload MP3 files offer a powerful opportunity to engage the long tail of musical tastes. That's becoming an increasingly common feature.

International Support

We'd be doing our friends in the rest of the world a real disservice if we said any music service was perfect if it didn't make itself available to listeners anywhere on the planet. For all the love it gets, Pandora is limited to US users. Copyright in music rears its ugly head again.

Continuous Playback

Services like Seeqpod and Imeem require too much intervention. It's preferable to at least have the option to click play and leave your music player alone for hours. Hey Muxtape, how about letting me turn on a mode that automatically follows all the fans and "fan of" connections from any collection I start with?

DRM Free Purchases

We love Amazon MP3 for its DRM free downloads and highlighting DRM free links to buy is one of the many things we love about MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Sometimes streaming just isn't enough and you want to buy tunes. There are any number of ways to get music files for free, but when you find an artist you really respect - it's nice to send them some money.

We like the GrooveShark model of P2P downloads with revenue distribution to artists. The revenue sharing among listeners seems a little silly and we'd probably prefer lower prices, but whatever.

Good Recommendations

Music recommendation is something many, many people have aimed for. Few have nailed it like Pandora and Last.fm. Grooveshark rolled out a new recommendation feature today, but after just a little bit of use we found it unsatisfactory. The service generally has too much down time and it wasn't clear what recommendations were based on.

Social Features

It might sound silly, but there are two reasons that Last.fm really rocks and the social features are one of them. It's easy to discover other users and to listen to what they listen to. We've had a lot of fun going through our FriendFeed connections and seeing what different people we know online like to listen to.

Compare this to Pandora, where social features are buried in the back of the feature set and the gestures that result in populating your social profile (bookmarking songs or bands) aren't at all the most common gestures that users make (thumbs up or down). Even though there are millions of users, Pandora feels like a solitary place.

RIght: Sometimes we like to listen to what Chris Pirillo likes to listen to, just to see what makes him tick.

Atractive and Easy to Use Feedback UI

Pandora makes it easy to like or unlike songs, even if you haven't created an account. It's UI is more attractive than Last.fm's and these two services are among the only ones to really make the feedback UI simple and powerful.

Quality Ancillary Content

In addition to the social features, the second thing that makes Last.fm awesome is the additional information about artists. It's nice to be able to browse bio and background info, to see photos, etc.

It's nice to be able to view the lyrics of the song you're listening to sometime. LyricWiki is ok for this. Favtape pulls in lyrics from LyricWiki when they are available. The service plays your favorites from Pandora or Last.fm, using the Seeqpod API. It also links out to ringtone download sites. It's pretty cool.

We want to love IdioMag more than anyone for this. This little service grabs your publicly available musical taste data from other services, like Last.fm and Pandora, and then builds a "personalized music magazine" for you. For whatever genre you like, IdioMag identifies new and interesting bands, then plays them through an interface that supplements the music with photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and text from syndicated blog posts. It even uses the dominant colors from the photos to determine the color scheme for the associated "pages." It's totally hot, in theory. In practice the writing tends to be unbearably bad and layout ends up being sloppy. We hope the service will improve because it's a great idea that we honestly tell people about weekly. Idiomag and Grooveshark are doing some cross-promotion for each other; we're happy to see that.

Playlist Publishing With Good Interface

Everyone likes to share good music with anyone who will listen. It's one way we win cool points and express ourselves. From the austere Muxtape to the super cute if unscalable casset tapes of MixWit, there's a world of interface options.

There's no reason for a service like Seeqpod, who are already being sued anyway, to offer such an awful playlist publishing widget. We're guessing that almost no one ever uses that part of the service.

Band in Town Notifications

When a band we're listening to on a service is going to be in our town any time soon, we'd love to know. It's a real lost opportunity whenever a service doesn't provide this kind of information - there are any number of ways to get it.

A Space for New Bands to be Discovered

How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't.

Desktop Notification

You know how good online IM programs will sound a tone and show a message in your browser tab when a new message comes in? That way you can be using other applications but still know what's going on with your IM. Music apps should do something like that. Growl notification of artist and song title would be awesome.

MP3 Blog Discovery

Have you seen the Hype Machine? It's an MP3 blog aggregator and it's fantastic. Any music discovery system should include links to recent blog posts about the song you're listening to. It's a great way to learn about an artist and discover related music.

Oh So Much More

Friends of RWW have also told us they would like good mobile access and a clear path to revenue sharing with artists. What would your dream service for music streaming look like? Let us know in comments - maybe someone else will read this discussion and build it.

Photo at top "I Love My Music" by Flickr user shankar, shiv.

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

AideRSS plus Snacker

RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.

Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.

Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer

You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.

You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.

FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp

We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.

Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.

Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.

Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.

Facebook plus Dapper

The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.

One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.

Friends of RWW

We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.

Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.

MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.

Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.

Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.

Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.

What About You?

What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.

Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.

Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!

Is it legal? Will it last? We don't know and we don't know if we care. These services are such a joy to use that they reinvigorate our appreciation for what the social web can do.

The elegant simplicity, combined with the tech success of its New York founders, has made Muxtape the mindshare leader in the online mixtape market. Users upload up to 12 MP3 files and then publish their collection. The interface is like one big button and it's a lot of fun to explore different peoples' collections of favorites.

All kinds of mashups have been built on top of Muxtape. See, for example, our coverage of Muxtape With Coverflow [Mac] (pictured below), MuxtapeStumbler, MuxSeek Search Engine and MuxScrobbler - a script to synch your Muxtape listening with your Last.fm user profile.

Favtape

The newest entrant into this field is much easier to use for publishing collections. Favtape creates a Muxtape-like interface for listening to the full-length version of your Pandora or Last.fm favorited songs.

It's simple, but it's very cool. There are tie ins to Lyric Wiki, a ringtone search, the ability to listen to more songs that are similar or by the artist and other features. It's powered by the Seeqpod API, which must be one of the most popular APIs on the web lately.

Favtape just launched this week, but we really like it already.

Mixwit

MixWit is a Flash mixtape creator with a very nice interface and the ability to embed your player on a web page. See my example below. This service can have songs added by URL or through Seeqpod or Skreemr MP3 search.

Hint - click the play button below, or if you're reading this by RSS - click here to see this embedded player in action.

It's a relatively full featured Flash authoring environment and exemplifies the design possibilities that emerge from a confined space. The cassette tape border around images users upload is really visually appealing. It's all pretty easy to use and it's a whole lot of fun. It's more fun to use as a publisher than either of the services above and it might be more fun for listeners too.

It appears that there are some performance issues, though, as the "menu" command often doesn't work with Mixwit. That should bring up a collection of other mixtapes.

The Changing World of Mixtapes

Different mixtape services serve different purposes. The point though is that this art form is becoming easier than ever before.

Mixtapes used to be something you put a lot of time and effort into, typically making one copy to give to one other person. The loss of that art form is a little sad. These services are something very different, they are very public and considering the free music widely available online - scarcity is no longer an issue.

Are these services legal? That's unclear; they are riding a thin line and legal decisions may be made about services like this in the coming years. Streaming, as opposed to full, direct downloads, is a different animal. The original mixtapes were arguably illegal as well, though, and what a loss the world would have suffered if that medium had been strangled.

Where's Your Mixtape?

We find the new mixtape publishing scene pretty heartwarming, in fact. We hope you'll enjoy testing out the services above - and leave us a link in comments to your mixtapes so we can all know what kind of music the RWW community likes to listen to!

CC photos used above include the following from Flickr: radio:cassette drawing from my primary school days by Alicia Yeah, "The Tree" by helmet13, An intense morning break over the Angels Bay, French Riviera by mamjodh

Call it feature creep, call it "so meta it hurts," it appears that a growing class of websites run the risk of aggregating too much. Maybe that's not the case, but there are some issues and we're going to write about them. We'll also offer collected examples of sites that take one strategy or another - you can let us know if our own aggregation here is too much.

Sometimes it's a simple matter of priorities. Do you focus on developing the most effective user experience you can, or do you extend your service to as many niche user groups as possible? The best case scenario of course would not require such a choice to make, but for startups seeking to innovate - that choice often does have to be made.

Look at lifestreaming apps FriendFeed vs. awkwardly named competitor Profilactic. (profiles+disease prevention?).

FriendFeed has nailed user experience. It's simple, easy to use, recommends friends till the cows come home and is a great place to communicate about much of your friends' social media content. The number of sources you can associate with your profile is limited, however. At least compared to Profilactic it is.

FriendFeed lets you share content from 35 different services around the web and ironically, that looks like the focused option compared to Profilactic's 177 and growing.

What's not to love about Profilactic's support for super-awesome services like music mix sharing service Muxtape and the RSS community Toluu? That's awesome. Except not very many people use those services. In the mean time, I don't want to use Profilactic and neither do most of my friends. I could use it without them but that's not as much fun as using FriendFeed.

It seems to me that Profilactic has sacrificed user experience for long tail support. That's a sacrifice that probably won't serve them well. None the less, we wish them the best.

Breadth doesn't have to be sacrificed for ease of use, though. To test this theory out I just bought a t-shirt through the meta-T-shirt aggregation voting site experience Rumplo. It was just as easy as buying a shirt through one of a million T-shirt sites (which I had to do eventually, Rumplo is just a voted-on directory) and it was fun. Watch out for shipping and handling prices on some of those sites though, ouch.

Niche Content vs. Economies of Scale

In the brick and mortar world, commercial enterprises tend to have to choose between offering diverse niche goods on one hand or buying and selling the most popular goods in bulk and reduced rates. The lack of physical inventory requirements and the low incremental cost in offering most digital goods means this dilemma may not translate online (news flash!).

You can get as nichey as you want online and still scale fairly large, it appears. Is that the lesson of Last.fm and Pandora?

Perhaps the way this dynamic can still come into play is the aggregation of aggregations. Perhaps offering collections of obscure collections gets too complicated and mitigates the network effects of a large user base that can come from a more accessible user experience. Music playlist social network Imeem suggests that's not necessarily the case.

It doesn't appear that greater levels of aggregation has to lead to a loss of niche content for the sake of economies of scale.

Diverse Commenting Communities vs. Centralized Discussion

As Sarah Perez wrote here last month in her post The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere there are now comments being left all over the place. Just as some people get frustrated when the full text of their content gets "aggregated" and they lose out on pageviews, others are growing frustrated that comments aren't being left all in one place.

Fortunately, there's people working on this problem as well. Check out Sarah's post yesterday on YackTrack, a service you can use to look up all the comments left around the web - on or about a particular URL. You can even use this bookmarklet: YackTrack It!.

Yesterday we wrote up BooRah, a company that aggregates restaurant reviews from all around the web and analyzes them for emotional content. That's one way that aggregation can help centralize comments.

Dispersed comments don't have to be a major problem coming out of continued aggregation. It's going to be ok.

Conclusion

After looking at the questions above, the only remaining problem left really unsolved may be user back backlash. You can aggregate all day long but users may feel like it's just too much.

We would argue, however, that a well executed user experience and perhaps some solid recommendation technology is going to be able to smooth most of the wrinkles that come from these increasing layers of aggregation.

Top image: jrhode

The improvement in user experience for this already fantastic app is remarkable. Check out the how-to video embedded below. It's also a great example of several brand new apps all put to use together.

You can also skip the Fluid part and just download the completed "app" from Tom Martin's blog. You'll still have to make the CSS edit yourself, though.

If you've wondered why you'd use Fluid to make a standalone browser for a single web site, this is a great example. Following Sproule's instructions was remarkably easy, it took me less than five minutes and added a wrinkle to my internet experience that I expect to use regularly.

I struggled for awhile until I realized that my Mac needed a software update and that solved the problem of previews not appearing right away. For some reason still, a couple of the pages aren't fully previewing - but this is a much better experience than the standard Muxtape black box.

This really inspires me to try some more things out with Fluid, including perhaps a standalone FriendFeed browser - since the newly released AlertThingy really aint doing it for me. Update: While walking my dog and listening to Newsgang talk about politics and Twitter, I realized that to be honest it was through AlertThingy that I saw a Growl popup about Engtech Digging Sproule's post about this. Sometimes I drown in a soup of input and forget exactly where I first find things. I apologize for that.

The Coverflow feature combined with Muxtape is really great though.