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Songza Rocks on with API, RSS Feeds, and a Facebook App
Songza, the company founded by Scott Robbin and Aza Raskin during their time together at Humanized, has jumped into the social web frenzy.
For those that are unaware, Songza is a streaming internet jukebox and music search and recommendation engine (for the record, they are in full compliance with music download laws and they do pay royalties where necessary).
They’ve launched a facebook app that tracks what you’re listening to, shows the songs on your profile and shares them with your friends through your minifeed. It also includes direct links to the specific songs on Songza so that your friends can go listen to the songs and add them to their playlist as well; a sort of social music recommendation system if you will.
In addition to the Facebook app, the site now also generates rss feeds for your personal playlist, the site’s most popular songs, and the featured music list where up-and-coming acts pay a small fee to get their songs exposed to Songza’s users. The obvious advantage here being that you can know push what you’re listening to to places like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Finally, they’ve opened their API, giving developers access to site data for the featured songs list, user playlists, and the last ten songs a user has added. It will be especially cool to see the types of mashups that come from this. Maybe, down the road, they’ll allow users to indicate their location and enable the type of mashup that would allow tracking of music trends across the country.
Songza looks like its becoming another great addition to the already startup-strong Ravenswood corridor.
(Songza Company Profile)
Aza Raskin (Humanized) Blogging
Having recently departed Chicago for Mozilla, Aza Raskin of Humanized has started blogging.Songza
Songza is a music search engine that allows you to play songs directly through your computer for free. The site allows you to create profiles and save your playlists. The site began as an interface design showcase from Aza Raskin of Humanized
People: Aza Raskin and Scott Robbin
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.songza.com
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood
Humanized
Humanized is a small firm that develops products that change the way people interact with a computer. Their goal is to make everyday computer use simpler and more intuitive. The main product, Enso, is a command-line interface that allows you to perform complex tasks with a few simple keystrokes.
The principals of Humanized were recently acquired by the Mozilla Foundation and will be leading user interface development there.
People: Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, Andrew Wilson, Jono DiCarlo
Funding: Angel Investors
Status: Acquired by Mozilla
Website: http://www.humanized.com/
Blog: http://www.humanized.com/weblog
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood