Webjay Acquired by Yahoo!

Mon

Jan 9
2006

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Talking to Lucas Gonze over the weekend, I discovered that Yahoo! is announcing today that they have acquired his music playlist community site, WebJay. According to Lucas: "They are true believers in the playlist. They really are serious about being an internet media company and they see the playlist (correctly) as an atomic part of media on the internet. ...we're pretty much the only playlist action that Apple doesn't own. Webjay is is the canonical site, my survey of formats is the canonical documentation, XSPF is the dominant open format, etc." Lucas will be relocating from Honolulu to Santa Monica to work with Yahoo!'s music division. Kudos to Yahoo! for recognizing once again the importance of the remix culture.

tags: web 2.0 | comments: 10 | Sphere It
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Comments: 10

ian c rogers [01.09.06 11:51 AM]

Hi Tim,

I thought your readers might be interested in my semi-official post on Lucas and Webjay joining:

http://ymusicblog.com/blog/?p=20

ian

Andrew Hitchcock [01.09.06 02:38 PM]

Hmm. I don't think this is quite accurate. MusicMobs has had playlists for a while. The site is more feature rich when using iTUnes, but you can upload any playlist in XSPF format and all the playlists are available for download in the same format.

Tim O'Reilly [01.09.06 03:24 PM]

Hey, Andrew - I was just quoting Lucas. But in any event, per Alexa it does seem that webjay has more traction than musicmobs, so Lucas isn't too far off.

Andrew Hitchcock [01.09.06 05:17 PM]

Hi Tim. I wasn't criticizing the post, I just felt his quote, "we're pretty much the only playlist action that Apple doesn't own" wasn't 100% true. MusicMobs is fairly small right now, so maybe it was off his radar (no pun intended).

Tim O'Reilly [01.09.06 05:36 PM]

Got it. No criticism in return. Musicmobs wasn't on my radar either, and now it is, as it should be. That's one of the nice things about blogs. We get to talk to each other, and learn.

Lucas [01.09.06 06:18 PM]

Andrew -- I'm really sorry to dismiss MusicMobs like that, because MusicMobs is great. What I meant to say was that aside from the iPod, the action in playlists is work related to XSPF, and Webjay is a main player there.

Tim -- thanks for bringing it back to remix culture, which IMO is a key theme.

-Lucas

Toby [01.10.06 12:41 AM]

No dis Lucas. Your work is awesome and what inspired us to go with the XSPF format in the first place (as you know). I'm excited now that you're at Yahoo and can further push the standard. It will be great for everyone.

Ian Andrew Bell [01.11.06 03:53 PM]

Hey guys ... just a point of note: PulverRadio also has a user playlisting feature, which unfortunately doesn't use XPSF, but refers to a stored Artist Directory which users can add to.

Our design was definitely inspired by WebJay, though our goals were different.

I would suggest that Lucas is accurate in his implication that WebJay is the only truly open, untethered playlist system out there.

Jeremy Edward [05.11.06 10:47 AM]

There are a few other playlist sites out there as well -- Project Playlist and Plurn. Project Playlist seems to be going after the myspace playlist, while Plurn seems to directly compete with Webjay.