What Do You Get When You Mix YouTube And Last.fm? ListAndPlay.

Last month we told you about ListAndPlay.com, a new service that lets you create and share instant YouTube playlists in seconds. This week, ListAndPlay.com's founder, Jonathan Bouman, launched a new TV mode for the service, which lets users input a single song to generate a 150-song playlist. He's calling it "Your own MTV". I had the opportunity to ask Bouman a few questions about both ListAndPlay.com and the new TV.ListAndPlay.com. But first, lets take a look at how the new service works. When you enter the site you will be prompted to enter an artist and song via an instant search. Once you've chosen your song, the videos will start playing. The videos are sourced from YouTube and the service discovers similar songs using Last.fm. As you watch you can skip ahead to the next song and share any of the videos on Facebook or add them to a ListAndPlay playlist. I had the opportunity to ask Bouman about the inspiration behind ListAndPlay and TV.ListAndPlay. He told me that he saw room for improvement in the way that YouTube presents its videos. With the small window, the white background and distracting comments, as well as the fact that there is no easy way to create and share playlists instantly, Bouman wanted to make some improvements of his own. He says, "I decided to fix it myself instead of waiting on YouTube. I was inspired by YTinstant.com as well, and wanted to learn a new way of programming (JQuery/Javascript), so I started with nothing and ended up here." When he discovered the Last.fm API, Bouman decided to update his service. "I thought it would be really cool to combine Last.fm with YouTube," he said. "Everyone loves to discover new music and this is a good way to do so." Bouman himself has already bought 3 CDs from new artists [he] discovered through LAP, and he's sure others will do so as well. You may be surprised to hear that Bouman isn't a career programmer. In fact, he is a medical student and develops in his spare time. He told me, "I was at the end of a 6-month period of medical research on Hepatitis C and had to wait three months until my wards were starting, so I had some time on my hands to learn and develop the whole site. This is purely a hobby." I say kudos to Jonathan! Many people who program as a career have not yet succeeded to make a site as useful and successful as he has. The response to ListAndPlay has been great so far. Bouman told me, "On Reddit 80% of the large amounts of responses was very positive. Hacker News was also positive. And the site was featured on Tweakers.net, the largest tech site in the Netherlands. Furthermore, I've gotten a lot of tweets from people being very happy with this tool." Have you used ListAndPlay or TV.ListAndPlay yet? What do you think of these services?

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What Do You Get When You Mix YouTube And Last.fm? ListAndPlay.

This week, ListAndPlay.com's founder, Jonathan Bouman, launched a new TV mode for the service, which lets users input a single song to generate a 150-song playlist. He's calling it "Your own MTV".

Megan O'Neill

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Megan O'Neill