[Playlist] StreamFinder.com and XSPF parsing

[Lucas Gonze]

> On 8/31/07, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For open formats to work people should be able to build businesses
>> on them; there's nothing wrong with charging for a product.

Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:
> There's two schools of thought here, and they don't agree with each other:
> 
> <rillian> there's what I think of as the 'redhat' tribe who want to
> sell services on top of free software
> <rillian> and there's the 'fsf' tribe who want everything to be free
> 
> Anyway, I personally don't disagree with StreamFinder's approach to this issue.

IMO the more we can do to enable businesses, the better open formats 
will do.

A big reason for the adoption of XSPF is that it helps startups like 
grabb.it, Critical Metrics, and Hype Machine to do media.  What these 
startups haven't been doing, though, is linking up into an overall 
ecosystem.  They aggregate audio files or publish them themselves, then 
compile the results into a single stream using XSPF.  What they don't do 
is republish or mine XSPF files created by others.

One clearly commercial feature is the info elements, which are commonly 
used to link to an affiliate account on Amazon or the iTunes music 
store.  This is a hit.

On the other hand, the annotation features could be enabling commentary 
and interaction, but they are rarely used.  I suppose that this 
functionality is redundant with HTML.

And the ability to provision the same song through different sources 
doesn't seem to have many takers, even though even though it was partly 
intended to be a hook for commerce.  Maybe the issue is that playlists 
are rarely shared as documents, but instead rendered in a web page by 
their creators.

The biggest advantages of shareability seem to be the ability for 
publishers to use a variety of different players and for developers to 
introduce a new player that can be plugged into an existing set of 
playlist documents.  There is a lot of competition between developers of 
browser-based XSPF players, and as a result publishers (and their users) 
get better players.

-Lucas