This Is Good

So I set up the Gmail account for sharing mp3s as mentioned last week, gave the login to a few friends and it’s all be going swimmingly. (If I haven’t told you about it, no offense. I’ve just been randomly going through my chums, all of whom are compartmentalised differently in my mind, picking out those whose music tastes I know and probably missing key folk. Sorry if I’ve slighted you.) Basically we’re abusing the Gmail service in a most blatant way and if the account doesn’t get shut down at some point in the near future I’ll be amazed. What with 20+ people all logging on to the same account from different addresses, sometimes at the same time they’re bound to notice. That’s if they care, of course, and plenty of other people are abusing the Gmail service in varying degrees. At least we’re seeing the ads unlike those who are using it as a virtual drive. Although Jez isn’t – he’s hacked a way of downloading the mp3s and automatically streaming them, and to top it all his system converts the emails into speech and streams them too, which is rather boggling when you experience it. Like some kind of community radio take to it’s logical extreme where every listener is a presenter.

Why do this? Well, other than that it’s cool and fun I have in the space of a couple of days magically created an online community that works. That we’re infringing copyright is a mere unfortunate byproduct (and since it’s a closed network not really a huge problem) – the point is it’s the music that binds it all together. It’s been said many times but it bears repeating that music has some kind of fundamental importance to the human condition, be it singing along to the radio on the factory floor, going to clubs, concerts and gigs, sitting around a fire with a guitar or sharing tapes and now mp3s with your mates. If I was going to create a community I’d build it around music, even if I wanted to get other stuff out of it. Music is the foundation – talk about other things will come from that foundation on its own.

This Gmail experiment (and seeing as it’s probably not going to be sustainable long term once a few hundred people get on board it’s definitely an experiment) along with the seeming ease with which Jez has hacked cool things out of it has made me think more about developing this kind of community into something that isn’t wedged somewhat uncomfortably onto an email service. In essence it’d be a closed members only site (membership gained by invite only) laid out in a similar way to MetaFilter. Songs are listed in a pile system where once the limit is reached the bottom one is deleted to make space (which might sound familiar to some people…) That much is straightforward and nothing new really, but it’s the essential basics on which to build. Some of the developments will be planned out (such as a streaming radio service) but most of them will just evolve and the most interesting ones will probably come about independently of the site itself as people meet new people and stuff, be is music or more likely something else, happens.

The main stumbling block will be paying for the storage and bandwidth but that’s surmountable given the community aspect and by keeping it small (500 members should do it and a fiver a year to cover costs isn’t too steep). The other problem will be security. Sites like this that I’ve seen tend to be web-only and introducing audio streams and the like that can be played in apps like iTunes is going to be tricky to keeps members only. The trick will be keeping it secret, so if it does come to pass (and if it does it won’t be for quite a while) you won’t hear about it here. First and second rules…