History

Webjay was a web-based playlist

Playlist

In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. They can be played in sequential or shuffled order. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of radio broadcasting and personal computers.-In radio:...

 service launched in early 2004. Playlists consisted of links to Vorbis

Vorbis

Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...

, MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, WMA

Windows Media Audio

Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...

, RealAudio

RealAudio

RealAudio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks and first released in April 1995. It uses a variety of audio codecs, ranging from low-bitrate formats that can be used over dialup modems, to high-fidelity formats for music. It can also be used as a streaming audio format, that is...

 and/or other audio files on the web. Webjay users could create new playlists by copying from existing playlists, or by web scraping audio file links from external web pages or playlists. The site was created by Lucas Gonze.

Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 announced its acquisition of Webjay on January 9, 2006. It closed down the Webjay site at the end of June, 2007.

Web scraping portions of Webjay were incorporated into the Yahoo! products Yahoo! Media Player and Easy Listener.

The Webjay logo was created by Perri Harper:

Copyright Issues

Although Webjay did not host any files, it made an effort to avoid potential copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

 disputes by removing links upon request of the content or host owner. The site's copyright policy included this statement:

Even though we won't censor users, we would be grateful if users would censor themselves. Webjay exists to promote music which has been authorized for distribution on the web, not to make it easier to find unauthorized music. Please do not post links to unauthorized music. It will bring trouble. It will promote hoarded music at the expense of music libre. It will be stupid -- posting hoarded music on the web is a really bad idea.

Explanations by third parties

A commenter on a October 27 2004 story in Slashdot titled Interview With Lucas Gonze of Webjay (Republishing a piece from Read Write Web) described the site this way:

It's a centralized index of audio from all over the net. It provides tools to aggregate disparate and far-flung audio into a single playlist, and lets users judge. ... it solves (or tries to solve) a big problem with online free music, which is that nobody wants to weed through the crap to find the good stuff.

A July 15, 2004 story in the New York Times titled Multimedia Scrapbooks to Share described the site this way:

A handful of Web users are programming their own virtual TV newscasts and eclectic collections of video clips using a free media-sharing tool called Webjay (www.webjay.org). The site makes it easy to build, share and watch playlists of audio and video links culled from around the Internet.

A March 30, 2004 story in Jon Udell

Jon udell

Jon Udell is an "Evangelist" at Microsoft. Previously he was lead analyst for the Infoworld Test Center.Udell is author of Practical Internet Groupware, published in 1999 by O'Reilly Media, and is an advisor to O'Reilly's Safari Tech Books Online. He wrote the column "Tangled in the Threads" for...

's blog titled Blogs + playlists = collaborative listening described the site this way:

There are a bunch of things that frustrate me about playlists. Competing formats: m3u, smil. Inconsistent behavior: if you want your tunes (and associated images) to render as you expect, you're looking at an insane test matrix. Crappy metadata: missing or incomplete, and often hard to find. Despite all these irritations I find myself returning to Webjay for the same reasons I write this blog and read others. What I know, I want to share with others. What others know, I want to know too.

If it's easy to buy music online, I sometimes will. But first it has to be easy to find, listen to, talk about, and share tunes.

A April 22, 2004 story in the New York Times described the site this way:

Webjay.org, a new site, helps uncover links to songs by making it easy for users to create and share playlists of songs on the Web. When you click on a playlist, the site assembles the links into a seamless radio show that you can listen to without any messy downloading. Think of it as a mix tape you can share and change at will.

Webjay Wizard described the site this way:

Webjay is the mother of music playlist generators: it allows you to create a playlist of MP3, RAM, WMA files, or can take any page, feed, playlist file and convert it to working playlists for RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Quicktime and even to XSPF for the Flash MusicPlayer.

Relationship to XSPF

The XSPF

XSPF

XML Shareable Playlist Format , pronounced spiff, is an XML-based playlist format for digital media, sponsored by the Xiph.Org Foundation....

 playlist format evolved from Webjay in the following way.

Webjay predated the common practice (in 2008) of having a web playlist be edited and managed by a single site, then exported to other sites with a Flash widget that can play the playlist.

Playlists on Webjay were played by generating a text file in one of a variety of common playlist formats, including ASX, SMIL, and M3U. The playlist file contained a list of URLs of multimedia files from different third party sites. The playlists were downloaded to a client-side media player like Windows Media Player, Real Audio, Quicktime, or Winamp. The client-side media player would play the URLs one after another, giving the cumulative impression of a single continuous stream.

After the XSPF

XSPF

XML Shareable Playlist Format , pronounced spiff, is an XML-based playlist format for digital media, sponsored by the Xiph.Org Foundation....

 playlist format came into existence and before any media players could render an XSPF playlist, Webjay added the ability to generate an XSPF file for any playlists on the site. It did not provide a player, only playlists, so at first the files could not be played. An independent developer created an XSPF player known as XSPF Musicplayer. It did not provide playlists. Webjay and XSPF Musicplayer were independent products that were only useful as a pair. Another independent developer created a web site to put Webjay and XSPF Musicplayer together. This site was called Webjay Wizard.

Because XSPF Musicplayer is written in Flash it can be used in the browser without launching a client-side multimedia player like Windows Media Player. As a result it was used to embed music in pages on social networking sites such as Myspace, as a Web widget

Web widget

In computing a web widget is a software widget for the web. It's a small application that can be installed and executed within a web page by an end user. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: portlet, gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule,...

. This created popular demand for XSPF.

Other XSPF players came into being to compete with XSPF Musicplayer. When Webjay was closed down by Yahoo!, other XSPF editing and generation tools took its place. XSPF continued to exist.

External links

• Webjay
• Import your WebJay Playlists, Here's How
• Video interview of Lucas Gonze by Zadi Diaz of EPIC FU, weekly web show that covers online pop culture (September 4, 2008)