We just finished adding five new third-party services to EzMixr’s data importing feature.  We can now pull user data from The Hype Machine, Rhapsody, imeem, Netflix, and Hulu.  EzMixr adds your user histories from these services to an OpenTaste profile and then recommends videos based on your user data.  Pretty cool.

Also, now you can actually see EzMixr in action.  We are getting ready to make a live version of EzMixr available to the public, but until then view the screencast of EzMixr here.

Read more about the Ezmixr application

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We recently completed the first version of EzMixr, a demo application built on the OpenTaste Protocol.  Ezmixr’s main functionality allows users to import a summary of their music histories from last.fm, iLike, and MyStrands, and from that summary EzMixr creates a playlist of music videos.

This is what EzMixr is doing behind the scenes:

• retrieving user histories from third-party services,
• summarizing user histories and writing them to an OpenTaste profile
• storing & retrieving the OpenTaste profile
• making simple music video recommendations based on the OpenTaste Profile

Ideally these functions would be split into three distinct services performed by different parties:

• retrieving & summarizing data performed by an OpenTaste Supplier
• storing & serving the OpenTaste profiles performed by an OpenTaste Service Provider.
• retrieving OpenTaste profiles & making recommendations performed by an OpenTaste Consumer.

Now perhaps those titles don’t mean much to you, so let us clarify them for you, quoting from the soon to be released “OpenTaste Protocol Overview”

Supplier
An website or application that generates OpenTaste profiles which are uploaded to an OpenTaste Service Provider. An OT Consumer is always assumed to be a potential OT Supplier and vice-versa unless otherwise indicated in this note. An OT Service Provider MUST always allow the User to control whether an OT Consumer may also be an OT Supplier, or whether an OT Supplier may not be an OT Consumer.

Service Provider
An OAuth Service Provider that manages OpenTaste profiles and which provides access using the OpenTaste protocol implementation of the OAuth protocol.

Consumer
An OAuth Consumer that specifically requests OpenTaste profiles from an OpenTaste Service Provider.

So in the case of EzMixr, the application is fulfilling all three roles, but eventually we’d like to see services working with each other.  As the definition notes, it makes sense that Consumers would also turn around and supply data as well, but that is not required.

Right now the EzMixr application is living on our internal website, so it’s not accessible to the world yet.  We’ll keep you posted if and when we make it available to everyone.  If you have any questions about how we built EzMixr or about OpenTaste or about how to become an OpenTaste Suplier, Consumer, or Service Provider, please send us an email or leave a comment here on the blog.

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Over the past few months, our team has been working hard on several aspects of the OpenTaste project.  We want to keep you up to speed with the progress we’ve been making.  Here are the highlights:

• We have been developing some relationships in the data-portability community to get some synergistic feedback from developers who are hoping to implement OpenTaste.  If you would like to be involved in the discussion, please let us know.

• We redesigned the look and feel of this site (not a major upgrade, but it’s something we’ve done lately)

• Our team built a demo application (called EzMixr) that utilized the OpenTaste protocol to recommend music videos based on music history from last.fm, iLike, or MyStrands.

• One hot topic of current discussions is how to encourage adoption of the OpenTaste protocol.  If you have an idea for the “killer-app” for OpenTaste, we’d love to hear from you.

That’s all for now.  We should be writing more updates in the near future.  To stay up to speed, subscribe to our RSS feed.

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Web 2.0 is quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Data portability, the Open Web, data-sharing, open standards, social networks, privacy; the realization is growing that the digital artifacts we create, both those we compose by our own hand and those we compose about us for the web sites we visit to note down, have significant value to us.  In step with that increasing awareness, the demand is growing that we should be in control of our data and be able to easily share it to improve and simplify our lives on the web.

OpenTaste is a concept and an initiative to create web-scale tools and infrastructure to share some of the most important data we generate — our tastes.  OpenTaste builds on APML and ideas about attention-profiling, but introduces new features and concepts about taste-sharing needed for practical web personalization.

The new OpenTaste website announces stepped activities in a project that has been underway for some months now.  Some key technology will be rolled out over the next few months, in step with activities to release a standard and build adoption.  Join us in building the personalized web.

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