It's been a little while since a music related online service has come along which has made me drop everything and rush to try it out and find out more. MoreCowbell.dj is that thing. The service is a spin off of US tv show Saturday Night Live, where a special show featured Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, the cowbell player, and Christopher Walken as the music producer, Bruce Dickenson. It's simple but sure-to-be-massive mechanic allows users to add a variable amount of cowbell (and optional Walken) to any track they upload. They can then embed the newly modified track as a widget in their blog, social network profile etc. Here's one I made earlier:
The really exciting thing about MoreCowbell.dj is not the service itself, but the set of APIs that it's been built on. The Echonest provide a range of APIs which enable developers to build their own digital music applications without the need for expensive servers loaded with clever custom music software. Developers can use the service to analyse tracks and return important information like beats per minute and time signature which will undoubtedly lead to a whole raft of new browser based music apps.
I’ve been meaning to look into Clearspring’s widget platform for a while, so when I came across the In Rainbows widget on Mashable I thought I’d give the platform a quick test run from the end–user’s point of view. If you don’t know or care what a widget is then switch off now and wait for me to post about some more pretty pictures.
Posting the widget to my MySpace profile was really easy – I just popped in my username and password and chose which area of my profile I wanted to add the widget to. It was like taking candy from a baby that was asleep, and was giving away free candy.
Facebook was a different matter. I had to be logged into Facebook, after which posting the widget to my profile was straightforward. What actually ended up on my profile page was a bit of a joke however. An item appeared in my mini–feed declaring that I had “ posted a video”. The title of this video was “Widget”, and had I not written “Testing the Radiohead In Rainbows widget” in the optional “comments” field, my friends would have been left with no idea what the hell I had posted. This is quite simply crap.
Next I tried to post it as a blog post on Sleevelessness, which is powered by Blogger. I was expected to construct a blog post in the world’ smallest form and I wasn’t able to add any HTML tags, which meant I had to log into Blogger and edit the post manually. I would have been better off copying the embed code.
Don’t get me wrong, I think widgets are a great idea in principle – the idea of being able to create one application and plug it into a range of platforms is a very powerful one. It’s just a matter of both the widget platforms and the social networks working on their respective sides of the integration.
