| Thursday, May 8, 2003 |
13:10 - Joining the Collective
http://www.shareitunes.com/
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Boy, this didn't take long. Remember how right after Apple released iCal, sites like iCalShare started popping up-- providing registration, grouping, and browsing for people's individual calendars?
Well, iTunes 4 has already spawned the same thing: ShareiTunes.com. Because you can arbitrarily connect to anybody else's shared music via their IP address, but because that method provides no implicit browseability or discovery, users are limited to typing in IP addresses from memory (there's no built-in bookmark function, which it needs). But ShareiTunes.com allows people to register their shared music libraries and give them descriptive names, allowing them to be grouped and browsed and connected to (via the daap:// protocol prefix); it's the missing "discovery" component for what's ordinarily only a non-browseable network. iTunes just became a massively interconnected system all its own.
The music is still all just streamed, as iTunes doesn't let you download the actual files you're streaming from someone else's machine; but if anyone is looking for a metaphor, "Internet Radio" is a perfect one. Suddenly, now that actual traditional Internet Radio seems to be suffering a fatal death-blow dealt by the RIAA, everybody with iTunes and a Net connection (and a static IP address) has his own Internet Radio station.
Life will find a way, Mr. Hammond.
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