Never to late to make a prediction about the coming year. In last 2 years, we had a lot of social websites, exploding with Friendster a long time ago, and getting multimedia recently (relatively) with photo – Flickr – and video – YouTube and DailyMotion, where is the social audio? Some websites get it right, like Last.fm or Pandora, but there is still a place for someone else.

The Virgin Suicide experiment

For a few months, or probably a few year, I always wanted to virtualize a scene from The Virgin Suicide movie. In this scene, friends are phoning using music lyrics to make the conversation, with really great soundtracks. The idea I have is to do the same using mp3 and a kind of music chat room.

This morning, we tried to experiment with Sylvain it using CampFire from 37Signals as a music chat room and putting mp3 files inside this room. Well, this didn’t really work, as mp3 handling was really not working, and it was probably too easy to communicate directly to the other personn, not respecting the basic concept rule of speaking only with soundtrack.

A new idea for social audio

But a nice idea came from experiment: would it be possible to have a kind of audio social network? It would be like all these widgets for MySpace, or Pandora intelligent player, it’ll more be like a kind of radio where your friends are putting music inside, and you can just listen to your friend selection. A group interaction could create a kind of music timetable, with special music sessions at a certain hour, music getting random at the other time of the day.

I won’t implement this idea, it’s really a big job to do and it would need few months of dedicated time, but it’s really expected to work if nicely done.