Yahoo Music Engine Adds Open-Source Twist With Open Plugin Development
Yahoo’s move into the music etail portal space this week fascinated technology-watchers and rattled competitors. As the dust on the announcement settles, Yahoo is making a public--and seemingly welcome--gesture to the open-source community to contribute to the service with the unveiling of a dedicated plugin development blog.
Noted in Yahoo developer Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, the plugin dev blog is a clearing house of widgets divided into two buckets: Those that alter the behavior of the YME application (which, like Napster or Rhapsody, must be downloaded and installed on the client system to access the YME music library) and those that change the behavior of a web browser to integrate data calls to the YME service via a public API.
At press time, web plugins included stats, playlist blogging and search tools. DLL-based client app plugins included video and Yahoo photo album display tools, and an interesting-looking plugin called LineIn that purports to take in audio from a wave recording device, convert it to MP3 and add it into the user’s YME local library.
Yahoo developers have also embraced podcasting integration into YME early, with a plugin dubbed PodcastPLUS that monitors specified RSS feeds and automatically imports new podcasts into the user’s local media library.
Link: Yahoo Music Engine plugin blog.
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