On Muxtape, Twitter, and the Future of Web Services and Platforms

My favorite web service of 2008 is Muxtape which, inspired the analog mix tape cassette culture of the 80s and 90s, allows users to create their own mixes — typically 12 songs — upload the files, sequence the songs and post. One of the pure joys of the service is simple, stripped down aesthetic that encourages joyful random discovery. End users can flip through the Muxtapes randomly (by design) and stream an entire mix or sample single songs.

The only drawback to the service was that it was too hard to find other users/mixes that had similar musical tastes. Too random, perhaps. Enter MuxFind, a simple search engine that allows users to search by artist name, muxtape user name or by keyword. Suddenly, a great Web service gets 10x better because a 21-year-old German student named Jan Oberst created an application on top of a great service.

And he’s not alone, MuxSeek debuted a few months ago and was created by a user in Japan. As was this Google Custom Search service, created earlier this year by an anonymous user.

Though still small, Muxtape, which now boast a daily user base of 100k users, and leverages Amazons’ Web Service platform, is quickly becoming the model for a new breed of web services that grow in usage and prominence when they become platforms.

The best example is Twitter, the increasingly popular messaging/communication platform that and the host of services that been created to make the service more useful. The service, which now boasts over 1 million daily users, was once purely the domain of the digerati and has now started to hit the mainstream thanks to a wealth of tools that make the Twitter more valuable.

Witness TweetScan, a real-time search engine that enables users to search Twitter by keyword, user and date. And then there is Twhirl, a desktop Twitter client based on the Adobe Air Platform. Plus another 100+ services cataloged here courtesy of Twittown, a blog about all things Twitter.

And, of course, where there are users — and networks — there are marketers. For instance, Southwest Airlines, Zappos.com and JetBlue are all big users of the service/platform.

All of which leads me to believe that this organic model of development, popularized on much grander scale via Facebook, will be the biggest driver of innovation in the web service in the near future. The question, then becomes, how do we create robust, scalable platforms when we develop products or services? How do marketers participate? And what happens when users opt for web services rather than web sites? In a changing digital landscape, the evolution of Muxtape and Twitter are signposts worth noting.