I have a love song to write. I don't know yet whether it will be a tragic ballad or an exuberant ode to the triumph of happiness. But it's a love song for sure: I have fallen for Spotify, the latest buzzworthy "free music" service. After months of trying to find a great way to find and listen to music online, I believe I have met my match.
No, Spotify technically isn't available in the U.S. just yet, though the U.K.-based company hopes to bring the software stateside by the end of the year. My acceptance of an invite code sent by a generous friend therefore may or may not have been in gross violation of some international laws or statutes or regulations. But that's OK. Spotify, we can have an illicit romance for now.
You see, I needed this in my life. I had been thinking about "music discovery" of late. Last week, at the tail end of a trip in which I had been covering Google's splashy Los Angeles debut of its music search service in partnership with MySpace and Lala, I was sitting in the lobby of the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, a shameless hipster magnet designed in the manner of tacky Southwest-desert motels and which features a constant soundtrack of semi-edgy music picks from '90s-era Britpop to lo-fi and LCD Soundsystem remixes. As a parade of attractive, Sunset Strip rocker types drifted to the check-in desk, I was sitting next to a cactus, intermittently holding up my iPhone to a speaker, using audio-recognition app Shazam to find out exactly what was playing.
Considering the cooler-than-thou crowd, I probably looked awfully silly. But Shazam has been my preferred method of music discovery because I just haven't found anything else I really like. Queuing up a Pandora station makes for great party music, but I've never been enthralled by its recommendations for me. Music blog aggregator Hype Machine has very well-done charts to track the songs that are getting blogged and tweeted about the most, but they can be a little bit predictable once you've already listened to the latest mashup of Kanye West and MGMT. I use Last.fm, owned by CNET News parent company CBS, to tabulate listening-history charts, but have never found myself hooked by its recommendations or radio stations. (Sorry, bosses.)
Social music and discovery services are a mess, frankly. Some of them have terrible user interfaces, and others are slowly becoming the victim of poorly conceived business models (many of which relied too heavily on advertising strategies that have yet to bear fruit) and ill-fated licensing agreements with the major labels. Still others, in striving to get a leg up on competitors, veered into editorial curation--exclusive album-listening debuts, promotions and tie-ins, and the like. That can make for a whole lot of clutter.
Then along came my Spotify invite, and everything changed. The service makes no attempts on the surface to be an "influencer" in and of itself, instead just offering access to full-length streams of just about any song. That's daunting at first. When you first load up Spotify, you're greeted with basic top-music charts that are notably uninspiring (Black Eyed Peas? Kings of Leon?) and searches don't bring you anything other than, well, what you searched for. Social-networking features like Facebook and Twitter sharing are sparse and well-hidden. If you don't know where to look, it can be a little bit dull.
Instead, the "discovery" process is left up to third parties. Create a playlist on Spotify, and you can assign it an HTML address so that when people click on it (assuming they have Spotify accounts) the playlist will open right up. A popular U.K. music blog called Drowned in Sound has a feature called "Spotifridays," where a selection of popular music from that week is packaged into a Spotify playlist, eliminating the need to click around through various Web browsers and streaming-music embeds. A friend sent me a link to Drowned in Sound's playlist of top songs of the first half of 2009. I was set for the next 7.6 hours.
Then, this happened: My Amazon MP3 bill started escalating as my "shopping cart" filled up with songs from bands I'd never heard of before, like the Veils, Let's Wrestle, and the Big Pink. The no-brainer Spotify platform, and how easy it is for anyone to use it to create playlists and share them in a way that doesn't involve a single wacky embeddable widget, was making me buy music.
But Spotify's long-term prospects are still hazy. Its dual business models, monthly subscriptions (for ad-free accounts and access to its iPhone app) and advertising for free accounts, have historically failed to hold up in the face of the micropayments-based iTunes. CEO Daniel Ek has even acknowledged that profits aren't flooding in yet and accused the labels of inflating licensing fees. The specter of SpiralFrog, another hyped free-music service that went down in flames earlier this year, is still in recent memory.
It's also unclear as to how the Spotify service, currently available in Sweden, Norway, the U.K., Finland, France, and Spain, will fare in the U.S. when it arrives here. Google's new music search feature, which is right now restricted to the States, may give a big advantage to competitors MySpace Music and Lala as search traffic is directed there. There's also the potential money drain: Government regulations over licensing fees last year. Digital music, you could say, is an industry with a lot of emotional baggage.
Generally, when there are glaring roadblocks in a new relationship, it's a red flag that you shouldn't get too attached. But this is one where I'm willing to fight to keep it alive. I hear there's a chance I'll be shut out of Spotify entirely in a few weeks unless I tweak my IP address somehow to fool the service into thinking I'm in one of its approved countries. Or unless I cough up the money for a premium subscription.
And I'd consider that. Money can't buy me love, but it could buy me Spotify. And right now they're sort of one and the same.
A look at the newly tweaked Facebook homepage.
(Credit: Facebook)Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.
"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."
This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.
Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."
Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.
The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."
At the risk of sounding like a complete tool, the best way to describe Twones, which launched Thursday, is "FriendFeed for music." The Amsterdam-based start-up aggregates a variety of social and not-so-social music services--currently a total of 28, including Imeem, iLike, Blip.fm, iTunes, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News)--through a Firefox browser plugin.
Once you've set up your account, Twones (which I'm guessing is pronounced "tunes," rather than rhymes with "phones") will compile your playlists and listening history but will also, much like iLike, provide artist information, upcoming concert dates, and photos and videos sourced from Flickr and YouTube. You can also bookmark favorite songs and find out what your friends are listening to.
Twones doesn't actually host licensed music and the company doesn't seem to want to, which is good to hear: streaming music start-ups are one of digital media's most troubled niches, plagued by both legal issues and difficulty making money.
The moneymaking prospects for Twones, which has already taken investment dollars from the Holland arm of concert and promotion giant Live Nation, aren't yet clear. The company will serve ads, but hopes to also make money by offering premium accounts down the line for users as well as business accounts for artists and marketers who want more detailed information about who's listening to their music and who could be untapped marketing targets (among other things). But these are all obviously dependent on an active user base, and relying on an installed browser plugin may deter some users--especially since it's currently Firefox-only.
Twones is in private beta but we have 500 invites available for CNET readers. Use the promo code CNET09 when you register.
SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.
But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.
The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.
Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.
Oh, boy.
Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.
It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.
"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.
Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.
"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.
Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.
"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.
Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.
"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.
Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.
Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."
The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.
"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.
The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.
Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.
"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."
"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."
And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.
Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.
(Credit: Facebook)Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."
This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.
Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:
Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.
The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.
The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.
As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.
On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.
It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.
Is this Facebook's big assault on Twitter?
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Baptiste)Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."
The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.
"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access 'Lite' will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.
From what it looks like, Facebook Lite is a simpler version of the site and pares down profiles to basic information and a stream of status updates. The easy conclusion is that this would make Facebook's service look a whole lot like Twitter. And given the fact that Facebook had attempted to acquire Twitter, got snubbed, and then acquired the significantly smaller real-time streaming site FriendFeed this week, a Twitter-like service would be rife with implications.
Here's Facebook's official explanation: "We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook 'Lite' is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates."
Blogger Jason Baptiste managed to get screenshots.
The obvious guess is that this is yet another attempt on Facebook's part to stay abreast of Twitter in the race to own the "real-time streaming Web." There are, potentially, other reasons for launching a simplified site:
• For use on slower connections.
• For stripped-down computers in developing markets, where the 250,000,000-member Facebook wants to make inroads.
• As a more "portable" profile that could potentially tie into Facebook's aim of being all over the Web rather than a destination site.
Facebook hinted that the "developing markets" answer could be an accurate one. "We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience," the statement from Facebook explained.
Got any guesses, speculation, or conspiracy theories? Comments are welcome.
This post was updated at 7:46 a.m. PT.
When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.
First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.
Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.
But, wait. There's more.
In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."
It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.
"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."
This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?
Want to feel old? This album came out 15 years ago.
Hulu will live-stream a concert for the first time: Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater on June 1.
The online video hub, which announced the event Thursday, will be the only place streaming the concert live, at least legally.
Pop culture brush-up: the Dave Matthews Band was really, really, really huge in the '90s, known for lengthy live jams, for a Phish-like cult following that skewed more preppy than hippie, and for "Ants Marching," which was inescapable if you ever got anywhere near a frat house between 1994 and 1997. People generally loved them or hated them back then, due in no small part to the fact that they were the soundtrack of choice for the jocks rather than the indie kids or nerds.
It's a good fit for Hulu's first live concert broadcast--the site's first live streaming event was a presidential debate last October. The Dave Matthews Band's original Gen-X and Gen-Y fan base is exactly the demographic of 20- and 30-somethings--though not necessarily tech-savvy ones--who would tune into a concert stream online. And conveniently, the date of the show is the day before the band's long-anticipated new album, "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," hits stores online and offline.
Frontman Dave Matthews was, on an unrelated note, one of the first mainstream musicians to use Twitter actively.
Hulu, meanwhile, is riding the wave of mainstream success in the wake of an edgy TV ad campaign and the big news that Disney would be joining News Corp. and NBC Universal as a partner in the joint venture.
Right at the top of my Facebook home page, it now lets me know when there are new items from my friends that I can see if I refresh the page.
(Credit: Facebook)Well, this is helpful. On Friday evening I noticed that my Facebook home page was displaying a "Show (number) new posts" alert after I left the site open for a while and some of my friends have posted new status messages, links, or what-have-you. This is something that had been notably missing when Facebook debuted its redesigned, "stream"-focused home page this spring.
It looks like this went live earlier this week, per Facebook's official blog, but it doesn't appear to have rolled out on everyone's accounts immediately (I tend to leave a Facebook window open all day, and I hadn't gotten alerts until now).
Facebook says this was one of the most-requested features from users when it rolled out its new design. The social network calls it "auto refresh," but the term is a little misleading--it won't actually keep refreshing your home page (thank goodness), but it'll give you the option to do so.
This is the same kind of "reload alert" that you'll see on a Twitter Search query or on other interfaces like the Tumblr Dashboard--but thus far, not on Twitter.com itself, the interface that most people point to as the chief inspiration for Facebook's new home page design.
That's probably not a huge priority for Facebook, though. Most avid users access Twitter with a third-party app, something that you'll be able to do more widely with Facebook very soon.
You may now commence making snide remarks about the fact that my Friday nights consist of noticing new features on Facebook's home page.
This post was updated at 9:12 p.m. PDT.
A post on the Facebook developer blog announces the big application program interface (API) update from the social network that was first reported on Sunday night, which it's calling the Open Stream API.
It's the first major implementation of an emerging (read: brand new) open standard called Activity Streams, on which Facebook has been collaborating with developers for the past few months. Basically, what it means is that third-party developers will have access to a feed of all content posted to news feeds--notes, photos, videos, links, "likes" and comments, and activity from other applications built on the social network's platform.
"We've officially moved away from the Web of just blog posts, which a lot of these formats were originally designed for," said open-source developer and advocate Chris Messina, who has been spearheading the development of Activity Streams for about a year now.
"Over time, what I think will happen is (that) you'll see something toward the type of cleverness and ingenuity that has surfaced around the Twitter community, but in a way that is even more expressive and rich," Messina said. "In the case of Twitter, you're just talking about status updates; in the case of Facebook you're talking about a lot of different activities."
Previously, only status updates--the most Twitter-like part of Facebook--were accessible to developers. That's why this announcement likely makes the biggest difference to the creators of social feed aggregation applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.
But because Activity Streams is an open standard, other social-networking and media-sharing applications will be able to use it too. This means that there could be, say, an Adobe Air-based desktop application that brings in updates across photo-sharing applications like Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket.
Facebook is also targeting different types of developers--specifically mobile and desktop--rather than strictly the Web app developers whose creations made Facebook's platform such a wild success when it debuted two years ago.
"One of the most important stories to tell here is this is the first time that we've ever opened the core Facebook product experience, which was previously called the 'feed' and which we're now calling the 'stream,'" Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin explained to CNET News. "We're especially excited to see the types of desktop applications and the types of mobile applications which developer are going to build for the stream. We've sort of never really allowed this before, so we're pretty excited to see what developers come up with."
Facebook will be holding an event on Monday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., to introduce developers to the new API. Presenting at the event will be representatives from Adobe, which is building a Facebook application in its Air runtime environment, and Microsoft, which is doing the same in Silverlight; contact management system Plaxo and third-party app Seesmic Desktop (which already has unveiled its support for the Open Stream) are also presenting.
The "stream" took front-and-center with Facebook's controversial redesign earlier this year. Inspired by the likes of Twitter, the revamped design marked a shift in strategy for Facebook from static profiles to a real-time flow of information. At the same time, it proved unpopular among some users.
But Facebook isn't the only big social-networking player to be implementing Activity Streams. The emerging standard was behind the upgrades to MySpace's MySpaceID product that the News Corp.-owned service launched in March at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
"It was sort of one of the earlier opportunities we had to take a nascent spec and see it all the way through to launch," MySpaceID product lead Max Engel told CNET News, adding that his team first started working on Activity Streams last September. It's what powers a new MySpace "gadget" for Google as well as its feeds' presence on the upcoming Yahoo homepage redesign.
"It's getting where we need it to be, which is like e-mail: where you can write a POP client and know (that) it works," Engel said. "It's not even a full standard yet, so it's sort of exciting to see so many people get behind something so quickly, and it's definitely indicative of the general momentum of people who are saying we'd rather work open than work closed."
This post was expanded at 11:23 a.m. PT.
