Scott Kveton

I swear I’m getting old or something (we’re talking Internet old here) because it takes me a day or two to get my thoughts down from events from the past week … my real-time blogging abilities are clearly limited at best … :-)

On Tuesday of this week I had a chance to participate in a panel discussion entitled Portable Playlists and other POSH-ibilities that had myself, Lucas Gonze, Tom Conrad and Tantek Celic. This was part of the wider “Media Web Meetup” discussions going on and hosted by the Songbird folks.

We touched on quite a few topics (some of which I’ll comment on in another blog post) but the one I wanted to cover that didn’t get much airtime was (ironically) what it would take to make a portable playlist format a reality.

Before the panel both Tom and I were chatting about how there is really only one big problem that both Pandora and MyStrands face: catalog resolution. This is a huge problem that consumes quite a bit of developer time in both of our camps. Unfortunately, every playlist format out there simply punts on this problem. They point at some “resource” that is the catalog entry. Now, from a portability standpoint that’s great and I can appreciate the why’s of why you’d do that.

First off, what is this resolution problem I’m talking about? Imagine a user tells me they are listening to “These boots are made for walkin’”. I want to take that song and resolve it to some entry in my catalog. If I do a search for that I’m presented with oodles and oodles of possibles. Not only that, I may get the same song returned to me (that is the exact same waveform) that lives on a greatest hits album or a compilation of the 80’s, etc. We figure between Pandora and MyStrands we’ve got easily a couple of hundred thousand lines of code to solve the same problem. Bummer.

Just about everyone is going to have some sort of catalog entry. We have artist pages (for example, see U2) that are tied to specific catalog information that we get from several sources. We have to do resolution from ‘U2 – Beautiful Day’ to something in our catalog to give more information to the user when they click the link (or when we want to provide recommendations). It would be so much simpler if the user gave us an audio signature of that song so that we could use something like Musicbrainz to resolve what it is to our own catalog.

The other thing that has always struck me as a pain is the management of catalog data. When Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out this past Fall it took weeks for the data to propagate into sites catalogs. Wouldn’t it make sense to have something like a Wikipedia for song/track/artist information? User managed and available for free use complete with Musicbrainz signatures for all of the music? Then we could take a set of plays from iLike or Last.fm and do interesting things on MyStrands as could they. The big question is, would users want/need/be willing to update information as mundane as the track, album and artist listings for music?

I think a lot of companies don’t think of catalog management as their “core” thing they do. For us its recommendations. For Pandora and iLike its different. We all could benefit from a public commons of information that was referential across all of our sites. This kind of data negotiation is only going to get harder the longer we avoid doing it. I for one would love to see a project evolve (and not CDDB or FreeDB) that could provide this information in a timely fashion. Or is this all just Musicbrainz I’m talking about here?

We launched MyStrands.tv today (blog post) and even Techcrunch picked it up. If you have an account on MyStrands already you can log right into the site and it will give you recommendations on what you might want to watch. This is very cool stuff that leverages our recommender technologies to their fullest extent.

Props go out to the Spanish side of the house that worked hard to get this done in record time. Lots and lots of things coming down the line with MyStrands and I’m excited about what’s up next … :-)

It was in early 2000 that I joined a company called PDA Verticals that was made up of a bunch of guys I worked at Amazon with. Great company, great team, totally fun time … only one problem. I lived in Portland, OR and the office was in Kirkland, WA. This wasn’t as bad as you’d think … most of the development team was remote and so I was able to telecommute from Portland. The bummer was that I had gigs and gigs of personal music data and no laptop. Music was a part of my workflow … I could get under my headphones and just blaze away on email, code or whatever. So, when I traveled to Seattle for a few days, I was music-less.

Enter Ampache. Ampache was a web-based tool that allowed me to personally stream my music from my house to anywhere with a decent network connection. It was for personal use only (i.e. I didn’t have it available to the public, just me via username and password). It was the first open source application I had ever built and my experience building that tool was what has led me down my ‘open’ path over the last 7 years.

Ever since then I’ve been hoping to find something that mated my passion for the open web with my love of music. Last week, I was lucky enough to find exactly that. I have recently joined MyStrands as their Open Technology Lead helping them define their strategy as it relates to the ‘open web’. MyStrands mission is to help people discover new things and they have developed a unique social recommender engine over the past 3 years. They also recently raised a round of funding and are looking to expand the scope of that mission beyond just music. Hopefully I can help play a role in shaping that mission and making it happen.

I’m excited about where MyStrands is headed and we’ll be making some big announcements in the future that relate to my background and very heavily with the ‘open web’. Keep an eye on this space to learn more … :-)