This past week I posted about Twitter, asking what's the compelling reason to contribute? After that post, when I was trying to describe Twitter to a co-worker, I realized it is a similar model to the web app I fantasize about creating - songinmyhead.com (this domain is currently taken by a reference guide provider so there'd have to be some negotiating).
Searching the web I found a page on Yahoo Answers where folks were contributing the current song in their head, but not much else in terms of a comprehensive collection.
How I envision my app working:
A user goes through a brief registration process to get a login for the site, and then, Twitterlike, can return any time to quickly and easy enter the song in their head at that moment. When they enter the song they have the option of taking a few extra seconds to look it up in a database like GraceNote, to validate the data and potentially provide a link to a sample of the song. This would be important for showing which version of a song is in a user's head (for example, the national anthem as performed by Rosemary Clooney or Jimi Hendrix?) There'd also be a category field so that trends could be observed over time (spikes in holiday songs, a greater percentage of patriotic or anti-war songs, etc.). There'd be a streaming public display of what's going through other users' heads at any particular moment (again, just like Twitter, and similar to Flickr's home-page stream of which photos are currently being uploaded), as well as dynamically compiled lists of top ten songs for the day, the week, the month, etc. Users could connect with each other by the songs that have been in their heads, and participate in discussions about what's the best song eraser - "Girl from Ipanema" or Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again?" (shoutout to Mike). Doctoral students could use the site as a reference in their studies on the collective unconscious. It would have a great logo, require more and more servers, and finally be bought by one of the big media conglomerates and turned into something more commercial and less appealing.
But I digress. Upshot is, I guess I can understand the appeal of Twitter.
