FM RadioStation. A Windows Front-End to Radio Userland --
FM RadioStation. I've tried it, and it's really nice, clean and simple. Beautiful little app. This may be what's needed to push Radio to the next level.
The biggest missing feature ... extendability! The ability to write Guest Tools, tie into the guts of the weblog/aggregator, is what drew me to the platform. Would be nice to add myRadio to something like this! What's needed -- an XML-GUI language to add features to the app. [Brain Off]
Mikel is being too modest. His brilliant myRadio tool is a MUST for any Radio user! He's brought all the power and functionality of MyYahoo to a Radio blogger. Not only can you stream sports scores, stock prices and movie listing into Radio, but myRadio has "pages" (similar to MyYahoo) which I use to organize my many RSS feeds into categories. This is what drew me to Mikel initially, but once I got to know him - all sorts of other things starting happening!
We were THIS close to producing our own Radio add-on - which we code-named "Sweet Suite". It was inspired by Mikel's myRadio add-on and was supposed to do much of what FM Radio Station does.
Here's some mockups of the design.
This first mockup - shows someone creating a multimedia conversation. We define that as a new kind of micro-content, that would get created by new kinds of tools - that not only enable folks to go beyond just message boards and discussion threads, but utilize media and RSS feeds in their conversations. Marc Barrot's activeRenderer provides much of this functionality.
You might notice a number of OTHER new micro-content types - associated with radio buttons - underneath the post window. Reviews, stories, media albums and projects are the other micro-content types this tool would be able to create and publish. We would have also added people as well and support for built-in topic mapping as well.
Meanwhile you might also notice that there's a toolbar in these designs, with icons on it to spawn off audio, video and IM objects - along with controls for a built-in on-line onliner and built-in media management. In fact we've designed in an entire digital lifestyle product, with messaging, web services and identity browsing.
It's the people/faces/identity stuff that's got us most excited right now. Products like Fotolog, Ryze and Friendster are.....[well let me stop here and get back to blogging add-on products....]
There are many similar aspects bewteen Sweet Suite and FM Radio Station. I LOVE the immediate browser "preview" capabilities, which brings WYSIWYG to blogging! And the News aggregator - RIGHT THERE - is also a key feature. This stuff just turns me on! Great minds think alike!
Here's another viewpoint of Sweet Suite.....
This version shows a mini-link editor which would enable folks to easily add links (without having to hack HTML!) - an idea SocialDynamx should add-in, in addition to the notion of "people" and their faces. Once you have a notion of community - that goes beyond a blogroll, then we can........
But by far - my favorite FM Radio Station feature - is PICTURES! It's almost worth using the tool just for this feature. This is a great first step towards media management for blogging. The other 'Asset managers' and 'MyPictures' features (though well intended) have not been sufficient up until now. But at least there's a metaWeblog.newMediaObject API to use!
Now ANYONE can simply click to browse and open an image for your blog post! This whole notion of decoupling the authoring tool from the personal publishing system (otherwise known as blogging tool) is an idea who's day has come. Whether it be from NoteTaker, FM Radio Station or some of the other tools Dave's been cooking up - outlining, RSS feeds, the MetaWeblogAPI and community aggregators like Weblogs.com, Technorati and the Internet Topic Exchange are creating a blogosphere of inter-locking pieces of a puzzle.
FM Radio Station is an amazing step forward in the world of rich media platforms and what Macromedia calls RIA (rich internet apps) and a MUST capability that I predict ALL personal publishing tools will have - in the future. Congrats to Alan Kleymeyer and the team at SocialDynamx! And congrats to Mikel for myRadio - as well. And while we're at it - let's not forget to thank Dave Winer - for making it all possible! Let's hope he has a safe jouney out East.
