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photos by Lara Shipley

iTunes Voyeurism

May 6th, 2005 · 4 Comments

A fun game to play while working from a cafe with WiFi: Check out the shared music playlists in iTunes, then try to figure out on the basis of the collections which playlists belong to which of your laptop comrades.

Also, two free business ideas for those cafes:

  • Hook your speakers to an Airport base station and create an ever changing jukebox by letting people stream stuff from the collections on their laptops. Of course, you might need to come up with some sort of application to mediate this so you didn’t have people hijacking the soundtrack indefinitely.
  • Put a clickable map on your website of the seating layout of the cafe. That way, in bigger places where it can be tough to catch a server’s eye (cough, Tryst, cough) you can signal to the front counter that you’re looking to order something.

Tags: Washington, DC


       

 

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Gabriel Mihalache // May 7, 2005 at 4:48 am

    Wow! You live in “Mac Utopia” (which, strangely enough, conforms to R. Nozick’s notion of utopia)

    The only other person I know in Romania who owns a Mac is a designer. Can’t people see the moral imperative that are shinny, blinking lights and superior reliability? And the cool factor!

    Anyway, cofeshops could hire a DJ to play selected tracks for the shared playlists of customers.

    “And now, from LuvGrrl69’s playlist, Britney Spear’s ‘Ooops, I did it again!'” 🙂

  • 2 Grant in LA // May 7, 2005 at 5:54 am

    That is definitely a fun game, b/c you never know, there are some closet John Tesh fans out there, making it hard to pin point who’s hipper/more ridiculous than who….also, you’ll notice people start to have the same shit over and over, a couple new, “cool” CDs to validate themselves, and all the same old nostalgic shit. One Bone Thugs song, Under Pressure Dave Bowie, 99 luft balloons, etc. And then there’s some people who have, oh I don’t know, let’s just randomly say…, the Buffy soundtrack…..awful, just awful

  • 3 Lane // May 9, 2005 at 12:39 pm

    I heard that, brah.

  • 4 jordan // May 10, 2005 at 12:31 pm

    if you ever do it, i want a royalty, but as to your business idea #1, the way to prevent people from hijacking playlists forever is to charge-by-the-song on playlists. . . a play list of 10 songs costs $10, a playlist of 5 songs costs $5, etc.