Yahoo! acquires WebJay

A few min­utes ago, I learned that Yahoo! acquired Web­Jay, a site that allows for cat­e­go­riza­tion, edit­ing, lis­ten­ing, and shar­ing of playlists online (In a way, it can eas­ily be com­pared to del.icio.us for mul­ti­me­dia.) Web­Jay was cre­ated in early 2004 as a way to cre­ate the inter­net equiv­a­lent of mix tapes. Lucas Gonze, the cre­ator of Web­Jay agreed to tak­ing a few min­utes of his time to do a quick IM inter­view between meet­ings. Fol­low­ing is the tran­script of that interview:

TNL: so the rumors are true: Web­jay acquired by Yahoo! You should post it on your blog.

Lucas Gonze: That’s right. It turns out that when they sign up new peo­ple, y! makes them put on this pointy hat that sorts them into “houses”. This makes no sense to me, but it turns out that I am “hufflepuff”

TNL: Hehe… stay away from Slitherins

Lucas Gonze: They’re over in the DRM group.

TNL: Tell me the rea­son for this acquisition.

Lucas Gonze: The point of it is playlists. It’s a sign that Y! takes playlists seri­ously. The point of playlists is that they are to inter­net media what RSS is to weblogs and HTML is to brows­ing. Playlists are the one vehi­cle for timed media; if it has an intrin­sic sense of time, it’s a playlist, that’s an impor­tant cat­e­gory of func­tion­al­ity. Now, aside from Web­jay and XSPF, the action is all over on the iPod.

TNL: So, if I under­stand you well, playlist + Medi­aRSS + con­tent = new form of dis­tri­b­u­tion channel?

Lucas Gonze: that’s about right. From the audio and video per­spec­tive, the mean­ing of playlists is that they’re the con­tainer for­mat for the inter­net. CDs are over; mix­tapes are only an anal­ogy; Radio, tele­vi­sion, movie the­aters — not inter­net. So Web­jay and my other playlist work is what Yahoo is about with this acquisition

TNL: If I under­stand well, playlists are some­what of a rein­te­gra­tion item. Yahoo! is look­ing at them as a way to tie all the dis­parate bits that have come out of the break­out into pod­casts, inde­pen­dent tunes, movies, shows, etc… to resort things into channels?

Lucas Gonze: That is beau­ti­fully said, Tris­tan. I agree with that, except that real­ity is not quite as ele­gant. The point of this work is to cre­ate a truly healthy and robust inter­net media indus­try but one which is not just a trans­plant of the old ways of doing things. The new indus­try is going to be native to the inter­net (the playlist is a native for­mat).
Playlists do resort things into chan­nels and they do make pos­si­ble all the sort of good­ness we’re used to with weblogs — like Tech­no­rati and Del.icio.us — with mul­ti­me­dia Exam­ples of the kinds of good­ness I’m talk­ing about:

• Inter­ac­tiv­ity wide open; any­body on the inter­net is a full participant
• Imple­men­ta­tion wide open; any­body with the chops can write pro­grams which con­tribute to the ecosystem
• and inter­op­er­abil­ity; any­body should be able to author con­tent which any­body can render

TNL: This sounds dan­ger­ously like a light­net. You seem to be offer­ing a world that is widely open, while all the big por­tals are look­ing at lock­ing things up.

Lucas Gonze: I think that the place we’re going is to a media indus­try which is per­fectly at home on the inter­net. Given that I’m here to make money for Yahoo, it’s fine to lock things up by doing such a great job that users would be crazy to use any other software.

TNL: You men­tioned inter­ac­tiv­ity as a key fea­ture of playlists. Do you think that playlists merge mul­ti­me­dia with social soft­ware? And, if yes, is that a direc­tion Yahoo! plans to take it into?

Lucas Gonze: That’s exactly the value. Social soft­ware is not an empty trend. It’s cen­tral to the value of the inter­net. So the ques­tion with regard to media is how do you make social media? How do you make songs which any­body can get inside of and inter­act with on their own terms? To some extent that’s what playlists accom­plish.
About whether that’s the direc­tion Yahoo! plans to take it into, I can’t speak for Yahoo!, given that I’ve only been an employee for about 45 minutes.

TNL: So what are you going to be doing at Yahoo! ?

Lucas Gonze: There’s a space­craft which crash landed in the desert. My job is to inves­ti­gate the dead life­forms and attempt to make con­tact with their home­world. But that’s off the record. On the record I can only say that we’ll be build­ing best-of-breed internet-native social-software with tags.

TNL: can you throw a cou­ple more buzz­words in there?

Lucas Gonze: I can enable that.

Lucas then had to run off but I wish him much luck on this ven­ture. The obvi­ous value of some­thing like Web­Jay to a com­pany like Yahoo! is in the social aspect of shar­ing mul­ti­me­dia. I believe that the real value, beyond the core tools being acquired in the orga­ni­za­tion and shar­ing of dig­i­tal media. Over the last year, Yahoo! has been acquir­ing com­pa­nies that relied on the wis­dom of crowds to orga­nize con­tent of var­i­ous types (del.icio.us for book­marks, flickr for pic­tures). Web­Jay nows fills that space for music and could prob­a­bly eas­ily be extended to sup­port other media types. In that sense, Google is now tak­ing an early step in terms of merg­ing social soft­ware and multimedia.

There are many oppor­tu­ni­ties in that space: Much as Flickr has shown that user-generated and orga­nized pic­tures are a good way for peo­ple to share this type of media, some­thing like Web­Jay could extent from shar­ing your music col­lec­tion and/or tastes to an even­tual basis for shar­ing larger media files (like videos of the family).

The tool also allows for auto-discovery of con­tent: point it to a URL and it will find any songs that’s linked from it and orga­nize them into an easy to use playlist. This could have some great impli­ca­tions for pod­cast­ers as it pro­vides and easy tool to cre­ate archive pages.

Beyond the shar­ing and auto-discovery is also the open­ness of Web­Jay. What is most astound­ing, when you look at it, is how open it is. The sys­tem gives you the direct URL of the files that are shared, even though the files them­selves are not stored on Web­Jay itself.

Update:

It’s now offi­cial.

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