Interactive Radio

I just started using Yahoo Radio (LaunchCast) for the first time. I am very impressed. A lot of work went into this. And I don’t think they make much money from it. It’s really amazing: you have a wide selection of artists and music, and you can rate the songs, albums, artists and genres for the service to select songs for you to listen to on its “Personal Radio Station.” Also, it’s interactive across users: they must record user preferences and options, and then recommend music to other users based on that. It’s a free service, too, and doesn’t require a Yahoo account if you don’t want to customize your station.

And I have this amazing story to go with it. I tried running the player in Firefox, after selecting my preferences (the music I like). It didn’t work: the site said they don’t support the Windows platform from Netscape. No problem – I fired up IE and went right to the same URL. This time it worked, but since I was using a different browser (Internet Explorer), I wasn’t logged in. It saw me as a Guest, as if I were visiting the site for the first time. Even while not logged in, it started playing the music I had selected! It even said “Elliot Lee’s Station” at the top left, and in the headline box, it said “Reason for song: selected by Elliot Lee” (or something like that). Awesome! I can only presume that if someone else also went to Yahoo Radio at that moment, there’s a very good chance they’d have gotten my selections!