ViddyJam is a cool new web app we’ve been playing with tonight; we liked it so much, we thought we’d share it with you.
This app gets a starting point from you — an artist and a song — and extrapolates (using data from Last.fm) to serve a continuous stream of music videos from YouTube. It’s a lot like Pandora, which lets you create artist-inspired Internet radio channels and stream music based on those settings.
Just like Pandora, ViddyJam will occasionally serve you a video that’s less than fitting; but also like Pandora, you can skip the songs you don’t like — and you can keep skipping until you hit a song that fits your mood perfectly.
Better yet, ViddyJam can stream only music videos from your favorite artist. It can even stream a single song of your choosing, pulling from the many versions that may be available on YouTube. Finally, you can also choose to upload a playlist of your own. Just go into iTunes, export the playlist of your choosing and click to upload it to ViddyJam.
The app has a pretty interface that recedes gracefully as videos play and emerges when you need navigational or other controls. When videos are playing, all controls — even the YouTube player — disappear completely. You only see the various links and buttons when you mouse over the screen.
From within the app, you can create favorites for later “jamming,” and you can review your history of jams. You can also buy songs on Amazon or iTunes.
One of the things we like best about the app is that it’s beautifully ad-free. In that sense, it seems less like a startup product and more like a hacker’s side project (the hacker in question being serial entrepreneur Ben Bryant, who decided to show ViddyJam to the Hacker News community tonight); given the fact that it’s streaming copyrighted content from other sources, it’s unlikely the creators will try to capitalize on it any time soon.
ViddyJam is simple and good-looking; it’s fun to run in the background or on a spare monitor; and it would probably be a hit at parties. Give it a spin and let us know what you think in the comments.
