

iTunes Instant, Solve 2 Huge iTunes Problems: Cluster Interface & Slow Search - stephenou
http://labs.stephenou.com/itunes

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sebastianhoitz
Lots of people jumping on the Google Instant train...

Anyways, towards your iTunes instant: Why not offer the possibility to preview
songs from your web app? You get the preview URL via the API!

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stephenou
Good idea. I think that is totally possible through HTML5 right?

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johnwong
Yes. Check out Marco Arment's preview.fm. He had a similar web app that allows
you to preview album.

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stephenou
Oh yeah, I've heard about it before. I will definitely implement it using
<audio> if it doesn't heavily affect loadtime.

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johnwong
Definitely man! That feature will be quite useful.

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stephenou
Thanks.

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chrisjacob
Under development: <http://iswebapp.com/itunes/rss>

For now the site does cross country iTunes RSS search (for Music, Podcasts,
Apps, Movies, etc) and displays Album art with tooltip Artist / Album info
(via title="...").

iswebapp.com will be a collection of "Unofficial and Experimental iTunes Store
Web Apps"... aiming to build new experiences for iTunes content with lots of
HTML5/CSS3 sexiness.

A minimal UI with fast load times. Single purpose apps... much like Stephen's
brilliant work.

I will be building more web apps on the iTunes RSS/Search API's - affiliated
of course. I plan to release an open source jQuery Plugin for RSS, Search and
Affiliate link generation. If you're interested drop me a line @i_chris_jacob

I started this site a few weeks back but got distracted by Node.js and
theories on how to best make the AJAX content indexable (headless browsers,
etc).

Excited to see such keen interest in Stephen's work... guess I'm onto a good
idea. Congrats to Stephen for nailing Instant Search while it's so hot. Wish I
was as clever at 15 y/o!

Follow @iswebapp - I'll be tweeting once the ball gets rolling.

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mcs
All of these jsonp / iframe based instantizers have to be putting load on
servers (probably not in great volume, but still). There's a reason Google had
to put special consideration into how to make the ajax-endpoints scale :)

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VincentJones
In terms of scalability, YouTube Instant will encounter lots more problems
than iTunes Instant. It's full-length video vs. 100x100 artwork image.

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mcs
For Youtube Instant, the actual search terms are hitting
suggestqueries.google.com for the autocompletion, which is what is powering
google.com.

The actual video coming through is likely from a CDN, which are already built
upon an infrastructure for scaling. Probably not as big of a deal as you
think. Bandwidth wise it's unlikely that somebody watches the entire video as
much as they rapidly hit different videos.

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joshzayin
Would it be possible for you to add support for App Store searches in addition
to music, or do Apple's APIs not support that? If you had that, your search
would easily replace iTunes's for me.

Nicely done!

EDIT: Oh, you have movie and TV show searches. Out of curiosity, what country
are you in? Some results that come up for me aren't available in the US iTunes
Store.

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stephenou
I am in the US.

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joshzayin
Huh. That's strange. Why would the API return results not available in the
country the script's being run from?

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jprim
Awesome work man! To make it fully Google Instant, you would want to run the
query against the first result in suggest. For instance, if you type in "la"
you would get "lady gaga" instead of "L.A". Keep up the great work. :)

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stephenou
Hm. I am not sure if that's possible through Apple's API. I will take a look.

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mcs
Though not specific to music (and would have mostly non-music suggestions),
you could hit suggestqueries.google.com with a jsonp-formed request. (maybe
throw "music" in front of the typed query or something to apply filtering).

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stephenou
That's a good find. Though I don't know if Google's suggestions will fit into
Apple iTunes search.

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thought_alarm
From what I'm hearing, Android Market is the one that needs help with their
search.

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stephenou
Also, I've been thinking to make a more mobile-optimized version of the site
right now.

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LeslieCBarry
Congrats on this clear, uncluttered thinking. Most of us could learn from
this. Also, nice mention by Jason Calacanis re: job offer! Next up - Mashable
and TechCrunch...

Well done!

@LeslieCBarry | Iphso

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cinimod
$.post("/itunes/ajax", {'q': q, 'hell_yeah': 52012} <\-- Hell yeah? :P

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stephenou
That's like a form key. :)

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shortformblog
You're a smart man. You set this up for the referral program. Once TechCrunch
and Mashable get a hold of this, you're gonna be rich.

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stephenou
Honestly speaking, I am not trying to make loads of money out of iTunes
Instant. I can earn 5% of the commission which means it's only $60 if 1000
songs are being downloaded using my LinkShare referral links.

Though I do hope I will get the coverage of TechCrunch or Mashable. :)

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shortformblog
Even so, you're offering functionality that people have wanted from iTunes for
a long time, so you may be more successful than you think. :)

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stephenou
Totally.

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ericdorman
I am working a new project on Android for security. My goal is to release it
sometime within the next few months.

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brianbreslin
@stephenou you mean cluttered interface not cluster right?

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konputer
Superstar!

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danielbru
Awesome work, Stephen!

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stephenou
Thanks, Daniel! :)

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yanofl
just soory it is not working in Slovakia

