Streampad Gets "Crunched"

My favorite "widget" of all time is the delicious playtagger that puts a flash player next to any mp3 link on my blog. It’s everything I love about web services; small, light, simple, functional, and it makes my page sing. What more could you want?

My second favorite widget on this blog is the streampad player on the left sidebar. It simply looks at my feed, picks up all the mp3s I’ve posted to my blog, and makes a playlist out of them. Click on the lower right of the streampad and it launches a flash player in a new browser window and starts the playlist. It’s great.

The same person built both of these widgets. His name is Dan Kantor and he was a developer at Delicious which is where I got to know him. Since Delicious was sold last year, he’s been working on Streampad. The streampad player widget is really just a fun thing he built for his blog and others.

The primary objective of Streampad is to build an iTunes like service in the browser. Not as a browser (like Songbird is doing which is also a neat idea), but in a browser.

You can go to Streampad at any time and listen to services like hypemachine, internet radio, etc. But if you install the Streampad server on the computer where your music library is, you can listen to your entire music collection anywhere, from inside a browser.

That’s a big idea. And I am rooting Dan on. I’ve installed the original version of the Streampad server on a home computer but I had firewall issues. There’s a new version which I need to install. If Dan can figure out how to get through firewalls like other peer to peer services have, then I think Streampad has a bright future.

And yesterday, Techcrunch took notice and blogged about Streampad. Dan got ‘crunched’. That sounds bad, but when you are building a cool new web service, that’s really good. Congrats Dan.