I met with Aaron, Nathan’s DJ friend, on Wednesday. He is super knowledgeable on the topic of music, tech, and group-influenced playlists/deejaying – in fact he pretty has done user selecting/voting of songs to determine his DJ playlist using Apple proprietary technology: iTunes with deejay app hooked up to same network as devices that have the Remote app. People can select songs from the library (anything from his iTunes library on the networked computer), other people vote on songs in the queue, and based on that he adds songs into his master playlist. Aaron did it about 3-4 times at a club in DC, and people got really into it and loved being able to influence the music for the night. So great, the idea is a sound one (no pun intended!), but it’s basically been done and by Apple. It’s been done with a bit of hardware and proprietary components required, but nonetheless it’s been done and pretty well and slick like all things Apple.
There’s the idea of making it more portable and through a social network, but I also discovered that this has been done: Spotisquare allows people to sign into FourSquare and contribute to the venue playlist using the music streaming client Spotify (isn’t available in the US but it’s only a matter of time). There’s also soundtrckr which is portable playlists that you can share/build with friends.
I spoke with Eliza, who asked what I liked most about the original idea, and my answer is giving people a voice in situations where they don’t have a voice even when the thing they don’t have control over is for them and should take their interests into consideration. Eliza and I spoke about polling students about school lunches (what menu they want for the week), but how do I properly test that when the test would only be that – the kids would be even more upset thinking they have a say and then being told “just kidding, that was just a test.” Also I couldn’t use mobile technology because schools all but condone mobile phones during the school day; the polling could be done via the web, but then how does this differ from a standard web poll? My friend who works at a charter school in Harlem said they also use SmartBoards, which come with clickers that students can use to answer questions (and polls), but I’m not sure if there’s anything there that I can work with…
I’m a little stuck, and I’d love any ideas, inspirations, thoughts about where I could go given the original idea and my updates.