Eric Decker : : Dynamic Persuasion 2007

Project 3 concept

The Problem: It can be difficult to keep up with all your favorite bands, sometimes it is not until a moth or so after they release a new album that you find out about it.

The Solution: My website will allow users to create an account, for which they input all the bands they want to keep informed about. They can also add their top 50 artists from their Last.fm account if they have one. Then using Amazon’s  ECS API, the website will search amazon’s database for all new and upcoming albums from those artists.  The user can visit just once a month and be kept up to date with their music.

• Why would someone want to use this?
To easily and quickly see if there are any new albums from artist they enjoy.

• Return value
The user needs to return to the site to keep updated and informed about music they enjoy.

• STAF & spread
As a valuable resource, people can tell their friends about it. Additionally, users could see their friend’s favorite artists. Another idea is that people could mark what albums they have and rate them. A way to encourage STAF is by limiting the amount of artists users can submit, and they get more ’space’ by referring friends.

• User generated content
The reference information is all generated based upon either what artist the user inputs, or depending on their listening habits if using the last.fm option. Additionally, if users are allowed to rate albums, that is more UGC. Another idea is making  a music network map, that visualizes people with similar taste in music to you.

• How this works as a ‘Product’
First of all, once it is built, it is good to go as long as there are no bugs, and Amazon does not change it’s web services. As a bonus, when albums are returned they can have a link to buy it, and if someone follows that link I can receive up to 10% of the profit. If the site did become viral with millions of people using it, and if people were buying music from Amazon though my reference, there would be enough income to offset cost for server bandwidth overages and costs.

Technical Challenges:
To retrieve product information from Amazon, I need to use their E-Commerece Service (ECS). Queries are sent using either Java or Ruby, and are returned with XML. Basically I will get the artist the user has uploaded from the database (can be one long varchar field separated with commas and then split) as well as from their last.fm account as an XML file. Then that data has to be sent to the java class and that will request all the albums from amazon’s API. Then the requested info is passed back as XML, and then into Flash, which can parse it and display it accordingly.