I'm working on a 90's Music Rating Game for RateItAll's MySpace App. The premise is pretty simple - you rate 20 popular songs from the 90's, your friends rate those same songs, and the app tells you how 90's music compatible you are with your friends (and lets you meet new ones).
As part of this app, I'm embedding song tracks into each page, so that the user can listen to the track as they play the game. I started using the Imeem song track widget (which I wrote about here). In theory, it's fantastic. You can get complete or partial song streaming for just about any song. It also shows a picture of the artist. This would seem to be perfect for our app.
But unfortunately, the Imeem track widget takes about 10 seconds to load. And for a rapid fire rating game, this just won't cut it. Most users would be on to the next track before even realizing there was a music widget in there.
So what did I do? I embedded YouTube videos instead.... these consistently load in three seconds or less.
So this was the first lesson I noted while building this little rating game - that slow widgets will lose out to fast widgets in the widget to app market, just as they tend to be ripped out of blogs by end users.
The second note to self that I made while making this game is that artists, like Sublime, that request that embeds be disabled from YouTube, will be ignored by remixers, perhaps negatively affecting their place in history. Sublime deserves to be included in our 90's Music rating game - they had a big influence on the decade, and are one of my favorite bands. But because embeds are turned off, they are being left out.
It's as if they never existed.
Click through if you want to check your 90's music compatibility with me on MySpace.
