Songbird screen
I’ve known about Songbird for a long time. It’s a cross-platform music player based upon the Mozilla framework. I thought it was a brilliant idea years ago, but it was a buggy mess the last time I tried it (about a year ago.)
However, Songbird has emerged, like many open source projects do, as a mature, stable, and, in Songbird’s case, a truly awesome application, because of the incredible extensibility of the Mozilla framework (and the talent of the Songbird developer community.)
I’ve only been running Songbird for about 20 minutes, and already it’s linked with my last.fm account, is showing me a picture search based on the artist I’m playing, as well as showing me a list of all of the concerts happening in the Bay Area by artists in my library. I can read reviews, browse videos, and read the lyrics of the song playing. It’s happily notifying Growl when new songs play.
This qualifies as a killer app, and it will give iTunes a run for it’s money. I don’t really have a good reason to use iTunes anymore.
Between open standards that allow songbird to grab data from all sorts of places, as well as the open architecture of Mozilla, allowing hundreds or thousands of people to write their own cool plug ins that we all benefit from, this really does show the power of open.
Next question: can we get the nonprofit version of the killer open source and open platform app?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
As you say there are lot of great open source applications and services Non-profits are using. Drupal for Content Managment, Wordpress for blogging and publishing. But a fully integrated suite is tough to find. Network for Good is awfully close. It leverages salesforce for its CRM, groundspring for its donation management, and and email now e-communication. And it has a social network side that appeals to individual donors. Network for good integrates proprietary services made available for Non-profits so it is different than what you are talking about. But I too wonder what the Open Source, Open Platform Killer App for the Non-profit would look like?
Open Source Killer App for non-profit? How about CiviCRM. It’s customizations beat the pants off of salesforce. Big and small nonprofits are using around the world, and they just picked up the #1 CRM tool in the NTEN CRM survey. Killer App indead.
my only problem with songbird (last time i tried it some months ago) is that it seems incapable of importing new media, so it only seems to import through my iTunes library sync. will have to check it again today and see if they’ve added better import function.