SongHop

@ericsimons40 hey Eric, nice work here, congrats on the beta launch! To be frank I am getting ready to launch a directly competitive product, so would understand if you'd prefer not to answer my questions :) Is this using Echonest APIs to recommend music, or did you roll your own recommendation engine? Are you using likes and dislikes to feed the recommendations? Is the music itself from the Spotify web API? Any thoughts on Next by @xtopherpaul ( http://www.producthunt.com/posts... ) and how it compares to Songhop? And of course I'd love to hear what you have in the works for the next release and where you think this could go!

@sammybauch DL'd your app but doesn't seem to work btw! Answers to your q's: we rolled our own rec engine, likes & dislikes are used to make better recs, previews are coming from spotify/itunes/rdio/google play (depending on the user's provider), next is great for people looking for covers of songs. Honestly, the next few releases of our product is moving more towards what the screenshots of your app look like - super simple with barely any bells and whistles. User feedback so far has been to keep it simple, so that's where we're headed. Also, almost all of our users use spotify to play music, so it was probably a good bet on your part to only use spotify. Lots of hassle working with itunes, google, etc for no reward. Happy to answer any more q's, and would love to chat sometime!

@ericsimons40 cool, thanks for dl'ing, but we're not ready to launch yet so im not surprised its not working for you. Probably Thursday. Sorting out server side stuff, so you hit us at a bad time. The music stuff feels like a legal minefield, which is why I was thrilled with Spotify's new APIs, particularly the 30 second clips. (You might want to double check their terms on this if you are using those). Honestly, Spotify free tier is even enough to get value out of apps that use their APIs. The only difference btwn the mobile free tier and premium is that you have to listen on shuffle on free and you can't save things to offline. So even if your users aren't primarily using Spotify for their normal listening I think its a good direction to move in. What's your team like here? Is this a full time endeavor? Also, why authentication, and why so much user info? Are you planning on bringing the sharing aspect more in app towards something social? happy to go off PH - sbauch [at] vaynermedia com

@benhoffman_ Glad you like, we're working hard to make it the best user experience possible. Wait until you see the update! Don't forget to share it with your friends.