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May 13, 2005
Do U Yahoo!? Will You?
Whatever the fate of Yahoo! Music Unlimited, the new subscription service, the bigger story might be Yahoo! Music Engine, the service client. You get YME by starting a trial subscription, and you keep the program if you bail from the service. YME might seem like just another desktop media player, but this program and its development staff remind me of
early Winamp products more than anything since those bygone days. In fact the lead developer, Ian Rogers, helped build Winamp. Ian is running the plug-in development and download community with the same gonzo insouciance that characterized Nullsoft.
Look at this. It is the YME Plugins Site. Here, you can see the plugin development work that has been in progress since March. The range of enhancements available for this brand new client is astonishing, and the freelance developers haven’t even gotten started yet. Video playback. Multi-room
synchornization in the home. Podcast fluency, including spidering and slurping. Smart(er) playlisting. Slideshows. Line-in recording. Unix command lines. New and slick library interfaces. Alternate mini modes (Ian Rogers admits the
default mini is “half-assed”). Yahoo! Search plug-in. An alarm clock (reportedly whipped up by a product manager during a meeting). RSS playlist feeds (I mentioned
this one yesterday). Library graphical data mining. Web browsing within YME.
It’s nearly unbelievable. A major media company releasing an open-platform product in a high-stakes indsutry, developed by a team that seems to be operating with an eye-popping degree of autonomy and personality. That Yahoo! mojo is rocking harder than ever.
Posted by roymond at May 13, 2005 03:59 PM