We just heard from DropPlay about their new beta social-enabled music site that calls itself the perfect streaming music service. Leveraging the power of the cloud-based applications Facebook Connect and the YouTube API, DropPlay weaves together a site that both organizes and lets you share your favorite YouTube music and playlists that you create. Unlike similar service Muziic (previously covered here) the entire experience is web-based, using Facebook Connect to store your profile and sharing data.
DropPlay describes itself as a combination of iTunes, Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. The interface is fairly straightforward, letting you search for your favorite music and watching it right away. Bookmarking music is just one click away, and organizing tracks into a playlist or sharing them with your Facebook friends is as simple as dragging and dropping the song on their name.
We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It’s still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don’t have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.
However, we do have some thoughts we’d like to address overall.
First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube’s advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the ‘milk for free,’ something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.
Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.
Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend’s wall. There’s no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook’s own original ‘walled garden’ approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.
