So reading through USA Today's website, I found out about some other online mixtape service called "Mixwit."
This thing stinks of venture funding and dreams of monetizing.
Sure, Mixwit beat Muxtape to the punch by several weeks, at least based on each app's blog. But Muxtape has developed into a clean, easy to use system of musical discovery and serendipity, while Mixwit, with it's TOS clearly written by an expensive lawyer, is full of shine, gradients, and more Flash than you can shake a stick at.
You see, Muxtape was created as a project by a photographer and seems to have grown organically as it was picked up by the Internet cognoscenti and lauded for its clean minimalism and ease of use. Mixwit, on the other hand, has some seed funding through Y Combinator and hopes, eventually, to be a complete online media hub. Add to that all the shine and tired (also sometimes cluttered) visual design and you may start to see why I'm not as readily warming to this web app.
I think there's another fundamental difference between Mixwit and Muxtape, though, which casts the latter in a more favorable light for me. Mixwit uses music you search for online, and Muxtape uses music that you (in theory) own. This means that Mixwit doesn't have to be representative of your actual music collection - it can be just your flavor of the moment at the time. Muxtape, on the other hand, adds to the feeling of nostalgia by forcing me to peruse my personal collection and and assemble that perfect mix of songs to represent my mood, personality, or something I'm trying to tell someone.
This thing stinks of venture funding and dreams of monetizing.
Sure, Mixwit beat Muxtape to the punch by several weeks, at least based on each app's blog. But Muxtape has developed into a clean, easy to use system of musical discovery and serendipity, while Mixwit, with it's TOS clearly written by an expensive lawyer, is full of shine, gradients, and more Flash than you can shake a stick at.
You see, Muxtape was created as a project by a photographer and seems to have grown organically as it was picked up by the Internet cognoscenti and lauded for its clean minimalism and ease of use. Mixwit, on the other hand, has some seed funding through Y Combinator and hopes, eventually, to be a complete online media hub. Add to that all the shine and tired (also sometimes cluttered) visual design and you may start to see why I'm not as readily warming to this web app.
I think there's another fundamental difference between Mixwit and Muxtape, though, which casts the latter in a more favorable light for me. Mixwit uses music you search for online, and Muxtape uses music that you (in theory) own. This means that Mixwit doesn't have to be representative of your actual music collection - it can be just your flavor of the moment at the time. Muxtape, on the other hand, adds to the feeling of nostalgia by forcing me to peruse my personal collection and and assemble that perfect mix of songs to represent my mood, personality, or something I'm trying to tell someone.