Peter Merholz has blogged the release of Soundflavor, the first product released from Adaptive Path’s New Ventures project.
Lane’s written up a case study describing the process that was used to develop the app, notably using an iterative, design-and-build process, as opposed to using a documentation-design-implement method (kind of like the waterfall method).
Of course, I know quite a bit about this process, since this was also the first product that I helped design after leaving Flock (I, too, can claim that i made this, along with Dan Saffer and others, including Tim from Big Empty and the great folks at Soundflavor). In fact, I helped out with the initial spec, product development and design process and facilitating the brainstorming that lead to the soon-to-revealed relationship between the app and the website. Unfortunately, early into the development cycle, travel and other commitments precluded me from seeing out the implementation of the product, even though the final result is very much in line with my original concepts.
So what’s so great about Soundflavor?
Well, unlike other streaming services like Pandora (of which I’m a huge fan), it actually pulls music from your existing music collection and music shared on your local network with Bonjour, creating interactive playlists that vary in “flavor”, or similarity, helping you to rediscover the music that you already own or that the people around you own.
Of course, in addition to that, Soundflavor will recommend new music similar to what you already own or are listening to for purchasing and building out your library.
And, with the Playlist Creator, you can take Soundflavor’s work with you — simply pick a track, artist or album as a “flavor” and Soundflavor will generate a playlist with as many “flavored” tracks as you want (more feature details can be found on the download page).
Reviews so far seem good, and I’m eager to see their playlist-cum-mixtape sharing community launch (think deviantART meets iMix) — and hopefully, someday, Lucas Gonze will have his way (I rallied for ya, man!).
Anyway, I’m dying for the Mac version to come out — as the subset of tracks I listen to from my 22,000 track library is starting to go stale (as evidenced by my Last.fm account). Give it a shot and let me know what you think — since I can’t try it yet and would like to know, in terms of iTunes controllers, how this one stacks up given its pretty sweet featureset.
Factory Joe 
Well, I’m really intrigued. I just hope you remember to announce the mac version of this if it ever comes out. (I’m a tad jaded regarding multi-platform offerings).
Just an opinion on the matter not a flick of your ear, I just wish that developers would announce their product for their platform when its ready to ship. If the product isn’t ready for a platform then don’t even mention the possibility of it being out on that platform.
I think this makes sense market-wise as well. I’m all kinds of psyched about this new program but I can’t run it so I’m not gonna bother talking about it on my own site (not a big deal). But, I see this happen a lot. A blog will mention some program, I’ll go check it out, learn that ‘the mac version is coming soon’ and never return to that site unless someone else remembers to go for me and then tells me all about it 6 months later.
I hope this comes across the way I intended and not in the ‘damn crotchety mac people on saturday mornings’ way.
If it’s any consolation, I agree with you. Obviously as a Mac-only user, I’m as bummed as you that I can’t even try out the app that I designed!
I originally advocated for creating this as a Dashboard Widget of sorts but since the SoundFlavor guys are PC-based, I guess their native turf won out in priority.
I’ll see if I can get an ETA on the Mac version, though I agree that “coming soon” oftentimes never does.