Have a ton of musically inclined friends (read: music snobs) who are always trying to wrest away control of the stereo at parties? Well, now you can let everyone pick the jams with a hack called DJTxt.
“Good music is crucial to a successful party,” says Dan Maynes Aminzade, who created this hack during Music Hack Day this month in New York City. “Every time I hosted a party, I’d spend a long time trying to assemble the perfect party playlist. I thought it would be fun to provide a simple way to crowdsource the playlist creation process and let my party guests select the music.”
You can check out the service pretty easily via a free demo (also see the screencast above to see it in action). Simply visit the website, add the bookmarklet to your bookmarks, surf over to Grooveshark, and click on the aforementioned bookmark. From there, you can either control the playlist via SMS (by texting !demo Your Name to 313-346-5483 and then texting song requests), Twitter (by tweeting @djtxtme Song Request #demo) or e-mail (!demo Your Name to dj@djtxt.me).
You can then add songs to the playlist and skip those you dislike by texting “skip” (texting “oops” will cancel a request).
The general demo is a public session, which means anyone can add music to the playlist if they have the number, but you can also host private sessions with your friends. Free private sessions lack SMS control, so if you want to use text messages as well as Twitter or e-mail to request tunes, you’ll have to shell out $2 per hour for premium service.
Aminzade used a slew of services and APIs to create this hack, including Twilio, TinySong, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Twitter, MusiXmatch and The Echo Nest, and it actually runs pretty smoothly. Granted, it is a hack built in one weekend, but DJTxt is definitely worth trying at your next party.
Image Courtesy of Flickr, Robert Agthe
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Spent some quality time watching the Home Shopping Network this morning to hear just how the Nook Color will be improved? That's what we thought... but we bit the bullet and tuned in ourselves to get the details for you. Simply put, HSN says Barnes and Noble will start rolling out an over-the-air software package in "mid-April" that will update the Nook Color to Android 2.2, bringing Adobe Flash Player, Angry Birds, and push email of some sort. It'll also apparently include "lots of Nook apps," though the channel's pitchmen only had one to show on TV -- a kid-friendly sketchpad, with a variety of drawing utensils and colored paper. HSN hosts also claim that customers who purchase the Nook Color on the show are "guaranteed to be the very first people updated," though we're not sure we'll take them at their word, considering some of the other fabulous exaggerations we just heard on the air.
