Soft District

I don't know about you, but I must confess I have never-ever used Yahoo! Music. Well, that doesn't mean it's something wrong with it, just that I usually know what I want, and I like buying music CDs or DVDs, instead of paying to download lossy-encoded music files. After being released as "LAUNCH" by LAUNCH Media, purchased by Yahoo! in 2001 for no less that $12 million, Yahoo! Music grew up to be the number on online music site in March 2007, when considering the audience reach and total time spent. Unfortunately, it's not like that anymore...


If you clicked the Yahoo! Music link above, you probably noticed already that you're being automatically redirected to new.music.yahoo.com, the new website for the service released last month. Despite this recent design overhaul, it seems Yahoo! Music will be turned to nothing more but a memory pretty soon, so if you're having DRM-protected files from them, you should get ready to burn some discs with them, since you may need one day to change your computer, and you don't want to lose all those nice tunes, I am sure of that!

According to an email to the Yahoo! Music Store customers sent out on the 23rd of July, its DRM license key servers will go down on the 30th of September, but while MSN Music is down, and Microsoft promised to keep the DRM authorization servers up and running through 2011, Yahoo! is sealing the coffin of its music store pretty fast.

In the end, the anti-DRM movement may have a reason to go have a beer and celebrate, because it seems the target of their hate is going to slowly fade away, and become only a gray page of the IT history.

Facebook is the best proof one can get on how fair could be the Internet as a business environment for starters. Why am I saying this? Well, take a few students, a good idea, countless hours of work, and then give this some time to grow... in our case, it all got as high as over 500 employees and an estimated revenue of $150 million. Well, nothing's perfect, so Facebook can't be either. Despite its share of problems, Facebook is doing a lot to improve everyone's experience on the site, so now I will move on and tell you about the latest Facebook news. Are you ready?

One of the best things about Facebook is that virtually anyone can create applications for it, but this can also be considered to be a problem, as it always happens with third party developers - while some Facebook applications are great, others are not that great, with a few being nothing else but abysmal.

The good news is that today, Mark Zuckerberg, the mastermind behind Facebook, said he's expecting for programmers outside Facebook to play a key role in making information and entertainment easier for everyone to access and share. In the last 14 months, since Facebook opened itself to third parties, more than 30,000 applications have been designed, with the most successful of them being used by millions of users.

Obviously, those behind these applications are not starving, since Facebook estimates the creators of the most used applications raised no less than $200 million from venture capitalists.

Now, the main problem is to remove abusive applications and keep Facebook clean of any malitious code that may be launched into the wild using it. There is also a plan of rating the applications, so "Every developer involved with Facebook is going to either walk out of here elated or scared to death," as Sean Parker says.

Still having Xbox 360 problems on your mind? Well, did you ever wonder how it would have been if Microsoft allowed third parties to create applications for this platform? I know it may sound like a crazy idea, but this is happening as we speak! This is as close to software as can be, so today we're going to talk about the latest Xbox 360 news here, on SoftDistrict, probably for the first time. Anyway, if you want to know more about Xbox 360 games, you should pay a visit to PlayerzBlog. Now, let's digg in!

While today's decision may cause additional Xbox 360 problems for a lot of people, including those Microsoft, "democracy" is the keyword in the software industry these days, and opening the Xbox 360 to third parties is expected to expand the number of games for the platform, making it more attractive than it is now. Since it would be nothing new under the sun to see a platform with more games going higher than its (usually better) competitors, I guess it's only a matter of time and luck now, because third parties can make things better, but sometimes they can also create a big mess.

According to Chris Satchell, chief technology officer for Microsoft's interactive entertainment business group, "Not only are we democratizing game development with Xbox LIVE Community Games later this year, but we're creating an opportunity for aspiring developers to start their careers on the world stage."

Do I really have to point out that Microsoft decided to offer independently produced Xbox games via the Xbox Live Community just in time for the holiday shopping season? Don't get me wrong - it's just marketing, and I have nothing against it, as long as users also have a benefit, and this winter may be probably one of the best ever for Xbox users, if not the best so far!

The tools behind this initiative are already available, and the XNA Game Studio was downloaded over 1 million times, but has also seen adoption in "more than 700 universities," according to XNA General Manager Boyd Multerer. "For some perspective, the incredible creative community we've unleashed worldwide is more than 25 times the number of professional developers in the industry," he concluded.

So, Microsoft is dreaming to get support from entire legions of passionate game programmers, and the idea of having a "YouTube for games" starts to get a shape.  For now, I wouldn't bet on Xbox yet, but today may become a day to remember, either as a spark for a brilliant future, or the spark for a big fire, one to top all Xbox 360 problems we had to face so far...