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.
…Just came upon 
Factory Joe 
