The Right Way to Web 2.0

October 20th, 2006

Josh Greenberg
Chief Technology Officer

The behind-the-scenes development of the Grooveshark system has been coming along very nicely. In fact, right now it’s looking as though we might even have time to build a few extra surprises into the beta release… but I’m not promising anything; don’t quote me on that. ;-)

Anyway, we’re knee-deep in all the traditional Web 2.0 [ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html ] features that everyone who’s hip to the new Internet trends knows and loves so much. Just look at the row of stylish buttons beneath this blog post and you’ll see what I mean!

Grooveshark will be full of tags, ratings, and community features. We’re trying carefully, though, to make sure that we don’t fall victim to the fallacies that seem to have captivated some of the other Web 2.0 applications out there: this new phase of the Internet has brought with it both good and bad trends. The good: glossy, lightweight sites that focus on allowing the users to have much more freedom than the old way of doing things. The bad: overused features put into webapps for no good reason at all, or sites that pointlessly focus on hype-building keywords [ http://www.emptybottle.org/bullshit/ ] and never deliver on good content.

So, where does Grooveshark fit in, you ask? I’d like to say that we fit into the good part of the Web 2.0 movement very nicely. We are all strong believers in the value of online communities, and Grooveshark is going to to reflect that. We’re going to try to build a system that allows users to control and expand upon its content as openly as possible, without making everything confusing and stuffed full of unnecessary features.

And that, folks, is where you come in - if you have any ideas for features that you think would make Grooveshark better or benefits that you want Grooveshark to provide to you and the rest of the online community, let us know! You can reach us through the contact form on this website, or by posting a comment on this blog entry.