Webjay

» see webjay.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

lucas gonze launched webjay in early 2004 in san francisco. the idea was that the open web already had millions of audio files sitting on people's servers, and what was missing was a way to thread them together into something playable. you pasted in mp3 or ogg urls and gave the playlist a title. the system gave you back a thing other people could play in a media player. it would also scrape audio links out of any page you pointed it at, which is how you turned a friend's blog post into a webjay set.

yahoo bought webjay on 9 january 2006 as part of the brickhouse-era acquisition spree run out of yahoo's bradley horowitz lab. lucas gonze joined yahoo with the deal. the site stayed up for eighteen months under yahoo, picking up no major new features and slowly bleeding press attention. on 23 may 2007 jon udell posted that yahoo had told users the site would close at the end of june. by july the domain redirected to a yahoo page that no longer existed either. the scraping engine was preserved inside the yahoo media player codebase.

i did not catch webjay at the time. between 2004 and 2007 my music habit was forum-linked mp3 albums on rapidshare or zippyshare, plus rar files shared between friends over msn. itunes existed as a thing other people paid for, and i would not realize for another year or two that it mattered. playlist-sharing as a separate website was not a category i was browsing. webjay was a designer-leaning west-coast indie product. i found it later, in archived blog posts about open web audio, the way you find a lot of 2004-vintage products: too late.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it built ~

the deep idea behind webjay was that playlists should be web-native and link-based, not stored inside a proprietary database. a webjay playlist was a url, and the items in it were urls, all the way down. you could fork a playlist by copying it or embed it in your own blog. scraping any web page for the audio it linked to also counted as a playlist. it was a precursor to almost every later "share a playlist" feature in spotify or apple music, except those services own the catalog and webjay owned no audio at all.

~ how it actually ended ~

the standard yahoo arc applied. webjay was acquired in the brickhouse window and kept around for a respectable interval to honor the founder. when lucas's priorities shifted to the media player, webjay was absorbed and retired. once that ship was out the door, the standalone webjay site no longer had a reason to exist inside yahoo. shutting it down freed up the team and let yahoo focus on the larger media-player play.

~ what it became ~

nothing exactly replaced webjay. spotify launched a few months after webjay closed but solved a different problem: a catalog you streamed from spotify's own servers, not a thread of links to mp3s on the open web. soundcloud became the closest spiritual successor for the link-shareable upload-anywhere idea, though even soundcloud hosted the audio rather than scraping it. the part of the music web that webjay assumed, where mp3s lived on personal servers and could be linked into a playlist, slowly disappeared in the years after as streaming platforms took the listening habit over. lucas gonze kept blogging about the playlist-as-document idea long after yahoo turned the lights out.

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