Goose, Delicious Goose (Yahoo!’s In-Page Media Player) at FISTFULAYEN

Goose, Delicious Goose (Yahoo!’s In-Page Media Player)

TechCrunch ran a story this morning on “Delicious’ new media player”.

This looks like this media player:

http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/

It’s been available on blogs like Aquarium Drunkard and Aurgasm for many months. Oh, and FISTFULAYEN.

It was the brainchild of Lucas Gonze when I brought Lucas and Webjay into the company three years ago. He walked in the door with this idea. As per usual, it took me two months just to get my head around it and then more than 12 months to build enough support in the company to actually build it. But build it we did, first with some very talented MusicMatch engineers and then with some great Web engineers in Santa Monica (big ups to you all!).

It’s very cool in that it is a single line of javascript and reads simple, easy to author, HTML on the page to create the play buttons. The page author needs only add the single line of javascript, then wrap an MP3 link in an href and voila, you have an inline player.

Note that the latest Foxytunes player also inserts this player in the page in a Greasemonkey sort of way. Very very handy. Install the latest Foxytunes Toolbar and then go to a page like http://awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com.

Neither Lucas nor I are at Yahoo! anymore, but it’s good to see Spiegelman, Stephen, Alex and the rest of the crew are carrying the torch.

I just had to write this to remind myself we really did have a plan for the new Yahoo! “Music” when I left there. With this media player, the public web services, Foxytunes and Foxytunes Planet, and a lessening reliance on licensed content, it’s good to see the train keeps rolling. I know of two other major things we had going on that are still yet to come, right, y’all? BRING IT.

ian

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

Trackbacks & Pings

Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks on 06 Dec 2008 at 12:00 pm

[...] trackback from the blog of former GM of Yahoo! Music Ian Rogers teaches us a little more about the background of the player, which is fact the Yahoo! Mediaplayer. It’s very cool in that it is a single line of javascript [...]
nezmar.com » More on the new Delicious audio player on 06 Dec 2008 at 2:39 pm

[...] my small discovery Ian Rogers, former GM of Yahoo! Music, has provided some background. In Goose, Delicious Goose he revealed that Delicious is actually using Yahoo!’s In-Page Media Player which was the [...]
Delicious brings an Audio Player for MP3 Bookmarks | Startup Meme - Technology Startup and Latest Tech News on 06 Dec 2008 at 5:41 pm

[...] of back/forward navigational controls, and has integration with Yahoo! Search, among other simple features. The interface however resembles a lot like Yahoo! [...]
Delicious Audio Player on 06 Dec 2008 at 11:26 pm

[...] GM of Yahoo! Music Ian Rogers confirms that Delicious is actually using Yahoo! Mediaplayer to support this cool new feature. He writes: It’s [...]
9GiantSteps · testing the new Yahoo audio player on 06 Dec 2008 at 11:28 pm

[...] Read about the availability of this audio plug in on @iancr’s Fistfulayen blog. [...]
Delicious、MP3リンクのブックマーク再生用の新しいメディアプレイヤーをリリース on 07 Dec 2008 at 12:10 pm

[...] Rogersのブログからのトラックバックによって、このプレイヤーの背景が判明した。これは実はYahoo! Mediaplayerだった。Yahoo! [...]
The Scripts Zone » Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks on 08 Dec 2008 at 6:16 am

[...] trackback from the blog of former GM of Yahoo! Music Ian Rogers teaches us a little more about the background of the player, which is fact the Yahoo! Mediaplayer. It’s very cool in that it is a single line of javascript [...]

Comments

Catbird wrote:

The player is great– and there was some kind of recent update that really streamlined/cleaned it up– used to be that sites using it crashed my browser every time.

It’s worth noting that AOL could likely introduce a player like this soon; they recently acquired Streampad, a “play your music anywhere app” that also makes a similar ‘one line a’code’ player for Tumblrs.

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 10:44 am ¶
BMIML wrote:

I remember when Lucas introduced the player to the Pho listserv. It was revelatory. It is good to see Yahoo Music going forward with innovations like these. They’re free, useful tools that improve the consumer’s experience dramatically.

(Ditto on unburdening oneself from licensed content, too.)

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 11:00 am ¶
Dave Allen wrote:

Yup, been using it for a while at http://www.pampelmoose.com and get nothing but great feedback…

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 11:43 am ¶
Nicola D'Agostino wrote:

Cool! Thanks for the background info on the player.

nda

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 11:47 am ¶
Joe Lazarus wrote:

The Y! Media Player is one of my favorite products from Yahoo!… I use it everyday… through the FoxyTunes plugin and on a few of my own sites. If they added a way to fast forward through a track and scrobble to Last.fm, it would be pretty much perfect.

This implementation on Delicious is great. Speaking of, have you seen TaggedHype on Delicious…

http://delicious.com/taggedhype

Hundreds of thousands of Hype Machine tracks organized by Last.fm tags.

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 12:08 pm ¶
Carl Sobeski wrote:

It often feels like engineers are the Rodney Dangerfields of the digital music space. So, I’ll just add that the ideas of several engineers, who weren’t mentioned by name, made it into this web player. In fact, one engineer, whose name wasn’t mentioned (cough, cough), came up with the idea of displaying a pop-up player in the web page (to complement the original idea of just displaying play links next to the tracks), along with the idea for displaying the playlist, and adding album art and clickable metadata links to the player. In the engineering concept demo, not only could you manipulate the song order and delete songs in the playlist, but you could also save the playlist out to its own HTML file which, when opened in a browser, would be played back using the same player. And, if you had another page open in a browser, you could drag/drop song links from one page into the other page’s playlist, which you could also save out. And yes Joe, it also offered the ability to seek through a track (which is especially useful when you’re trying to figure out the guitar solo).

Other engineers who made amazing contributions to this player are William White, Mily Dahlke, Steve Francis, Dan Hunt, Mike Davis, William Khoe, and Amit Behere. (am I missing anyone else?)

Maybe someone else can chime in and give credit to the visual/interaction designers who produced the final design.

If you ask me, Yahoo! has not yet realized the full potential of Lucas’ original idea of a universal web player that simply appears in a page as needed and doesn’t require a toolbar or other download. There is so much more that can be done here.

Posted 06 Dec 2008 at 1:44 pm ¶
Amit Behere wrote:

Hear, Hear Carl! Videos, Last FM and other radio API integrations, there is indeed so much more we can do.

he VISDs on the project who came up with the cool skins were Lino Wiehen and Douglas Kim.

And also big props to Dave Warmerdam for keeping the flame alive after Lucas!

Posted 07 Dec 2008 at 12:19 pm ¶
Dave W wrote:

Vis D was Lino Wiehen and ID was Douglas Kim. Easter egg (courtesey of Mike D): right-click the Y! logo to see the v2 player credits

Posted 07 Dec 2008 at 3:21 pm ¶
iancr wrote:

Thanks you guys for chiming in with the names of all the engineers who made it possible. I generalized because I knew there was no way I would remember everyone’s name. Great work to all!

ian

Posted 07 Dec 2008 at 3:25 pm ¶
Lucas wrote:

Carl, to get attribution under control for the future I have started a history page on the wiki. I’m sure I made errors there, but history is the kind of thing that really has to be written collaboratively so just jump in and fix whatever is broken:

http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/History

Posted 19 Dec 2008 at 1:41 pm ¶
Carl Sobeski wrote:

Hey Lucas! Wow! That history is incredibly thorough! What a walk down memory lane!

There’s not much of the old gang left at Yahoo these days. In fact, I was hit by the last round of layoffs. But that’s okay… it freed me up to work on an iPhone app for Slacker Radio (there’s an article over on TechCrunch about it now). Sorry for the shameless plug, but I put my heart and soul into that app for the past month and I hope you all like the result! It should be in the app store soon. (I’m not an employee by the way — just enjoy programming the iPhone and they needed an app, and they’re old friends back from the Musicmatch days, so it all worked out.)

I know Ian won’t be using it since he bailed on his iPhone… for what… a phone designed for the technically-challenged suit on the go? I just don’t get it. The guy can skateboard on the ceiling but he can’t learn to type on touchscreen? And that’s all it is… learning. Because once you get the touchscreen down, you’ll find that it’s way faster to type on glass than to physically press and release tiny keys. Interesting that the same logic probably applies to learning to skateboard. Sorry, Ian… just jesting… I know you probably couldn’t stand the hype around the thing. I think you’re more of an Android guy.

Posted 09 Jan 2009 at 11:00 pm ¶

FISTFULAYEN