Grooveshark

I was watching an interview of Rico Mariani, senior architect at Microsoft (sidenote: if you enjoy watching or listening to really academic or technical lectures, check out the Research Channel) in which Mariani explained why Microsoft always released their software while known bugs or issues still existed. Most people always assumed it was for greed and bullying around the competition. That might be true, but Microsoft obtained other benefits as well. Here are some reasons many software companies tend to release their products early (especially projects in beta):

• Get Immediate Feedback: the best way to test your product is to put it in the wild and let your users determine what they like or don’t like.
• Obtain an Early User Base: Being one of the founders in your market is a great advantage. You can build an established group of returning users. Also, users will always compare successive products based on your own.
• Shorten Product Releases: There’s an advantage to releasing a new product or update at regular intervals. Users see that the company is working hard to improve the product, and whenever you incorporate new features the community requests, you are able to increase the trust between the community of users and your company.
• Easier for the Company: Breaking up the development cycle into multiple stages is easier to complete because you are not forced to build the entire system at once. You can test each stage and make sure that all bugs and issues are fixed before you move on to the next stage.
• Leave Room for Improvements: Adding new features creates buzz that will help attract new users and increase name recognition of your product. It also allows you to develop features that are specifically based on what your users want, as opposed to simply your preconceived notions of in-house feature lists.

Presently, most major Web 2.0 companies use the same tactic as Microsoft. The main reason Web users love incremental rollouts is that, unlike the Windows world, they don’t have to pay for each upgrade, but users are still able to obtain immediate value. Developers like it because it makes our job easier (this approach falls under Agile Development methodologies).

What does this mean for the community of Grooveshark users? What you first see is not all that you are going to get. Every month, heck, every week, there will be another addition, another improvement, another bonus feature to get excited about. For Grooveshark, not all of the planned features have been added. Here is what we have so far:

• Music search
• MP3 library scanning
• P2P music streaming
• P2P music downloads
• User search
• Custom profiles
• Music recommendations
• Social song tagging
• Library browsing via sorting, filtering, etc.
• Custom playlist management
• Download queues
• Peer availability tracking
• Multiple concurrent peer support (per user account)
• Similar user recommendations
• Account statistics tracking
• Song ratings

As you can see, even at this early stage, Grooveshark is still very capable of handling most of your music needs. You are able to share, find and download music. You are also able to tag, rate and retrieve recommendations from your music. These are but the first step to building a rich user experience grounded in a thriving community. Keeping the community spirit in mind, the Grooveshark team would like your input for innovative features you would like to see implemented. Head to the features page to see if your ideas are already in the works, and send us an e-mail or post a comment if you have any fresh new feature suggestions. :-)

Del.icio.us digg reddit

• Posted in All of The Rest