I've been checking out the huge range of Web API's available recently for a project I have in mind. But I've been sidetracked by two new social software/networks.
The first one is upcoming.org which is a place to publish events. It support RSS syndication through-out and ical for events which are easily synced with modern Calendar applications like Sunbird and Apple iCal. Like most social software my events and stuff is public. I'm now checking out eventful which someone recommended to me over upcoming.
The second one is SIMAC: Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents. Its self described as “foafing the music.” I call it Audioscrobbler with extra semantic meaning. Interestingly, it actually uses Audioscrobbler, webjay and your live journal or home made foaf profile (Its about bloody time!) to build up a profile of you. I'm sure someday it will be possible to enter your blog url and it will work out the rest – maybe? But back to audioscrobbler a second. Simac, actually uses your standard audioscrobbler plugin to collect your music information. Which for me is great because I can now update last.fm and simac at the same time but also still use the audioscrobbler webservices.
The transision from Audioscrobbler to Last.fm has been a odd one, and honestly the recommendation and tagging in Last.fm is ever so backwards. On the other side, Simac is much more logical and is doing a much better job recommending new music to me. However the interface for Simac really needs some greasemonkeying around. Unlike other social software, there seems to be no rss, webapi or public profile, but then again Audioscrobbler has all this. Now if only pandora was built on top of simac and acted like a plugin in iTunes we would have something very interesting.
