If you cannot already tell, I like the way Yahoo! Music Videos Facebook application is put together. Having the ability to play videos on your profile is great and all, but it has done before (YouTube).
What really stands out about this application to me is that it has an internal search engine that scans through Yahoo!’s artist database. Also, Yahoo! Music leverages the ability to pull-together Facebook user information and provide contextual videos. For example, on the Yahoo! Music Facebook application homepage, there are video thumbnails that link to videos that are made by the artists that my Facebook friends like.
Through the application, users can embed videos on the Facebook profile both on the main content division or on the left-side bar. Users can also click on New Videos, Most Popular, save favorite videos, and send a video dedication to users publicly or privately.
“I got involved (even though I was already pretty busy on other projects) because a Yahoo!/Facebook app would amount to a mashup, and I love making mashups. Mashups are challenging because they involve multiple colliding technologies. In this case, not only would we be combining the Facebook and Yahoo APIs, which are very different, but I would need to be working in both PHP and Flash Actionscript, and I’d need to do a little image rendering on the back-end. I had been hired by Yahoo! pretty much on the strength of the mashups I had created with Flickr, using those same technologies, so here was a chance to exercise those skills, but also to get to know a new platform I had little familiarity with,” wrote Jim Bumgardner of Yahoo! Music.
Bumgardner also has an interesting blog where he writes about some of the projects he’s involved with at www.krazydad.com/blog.
And the Yahoo! Music Facebook application is available at http://apps.facebook.com/yahoomusicvideos/.
