iTunes Instant, Solve 2 Huge iTunes Problems: Cluster Interface & Slow Search | Hacker News Reader

iTunes Instant, Solve 2 Huge iTunes Problems: Cluster Interface & Slow Search

labs.stephenou.com

31 pointsstephenou36 comments

Lots of people jumping on the Google Instant train...

Anyways, towards your iTunes instant: Why not offer the possibility to preview songs from your web app? You get the preview URL via the API!

Good idea. I think that is totally possible through HTML5 right?

Yes. Check out Marco Arment's preview.fm. He had a similar web app that allows you to preview album.

Oh yeah, I've heard about it before. I will definitely implement it using <audio> if it doesn't heavily affect loadtime.

Definitely man! That feature will be quite useful.

Thanks.

It shouldn't affect load time at all. Don't load the preview until the user requests it. That's the one feature I thought was missing. Otherwise, it would be awesome. I mainly use iTunes to listen to preview, removing the step to go to iTunes for that would be awesome! :)

Under development: http://iswebapp.com/itunes/rss

For now the site does cross country iTunes RSS search (for Music, Podcasts, Apps, Movies, etc) and displays Album art with tooltip Artist / Album info (via title="...").

iswebapp.com will be a collection of "Unofficial and Experimental iTunes Store Web Apps"... aiming to build new experiences for iTunes content with lots of HTML5/CSS3 sexiness.

A minimal UI with fast load times. Single purpose apps... much like Stephen's brilliant work.

I will be building more web apps on the iTunes RSS/Search API's - affiliated of course. I plan to release an open source jQuery Plugin for RSS, Search and Affiliate link generation. If you're interested drop me a line @i_chris_jacob

I started this site a few weeks back but got distracted by Node.js and theories on how to best make the AJAX content indexable (headless browsers, etc).

Excited to see such keen interest in Stephen's work... guess I'm onto a good idea. Congrats to Stephen for nailing Instant Search while it's so hot. Wish I was as clever at 15 y/o!

Follow @iswebapp - I'll be tweeting once the ball gets rolling.

All of these jsonp / iframe based instantizers have to be putting load on servers (probably not in great volume, but still). There's a reason Google had to put special consideration into how to make the ajax-endpoints scale :)

Yeah, I agree. I will probably cache search results if load time is too slow. Also, I have a 0.5 second delay (after keyup) to execute the search function.

In terms of scalability, YouTube Instant will encounter lots more problems than iTunes Instant. It's full-length video vs. 100x100 artwork image.

For Youtube Instant, the actual search terms are hitting suggestqueries.google.com for the autocompletion, which is what is powering google.com.

The actual video coming through is likely from a CDN, which are already built upon an infrastructure for scaling. Probably not as big of a deal as you think. Bandwidth wise it's unlikely that somebody watches the entire video as much as they rapidly hit different videos.

I created a YouTube Instant Search and it's not hitting any road blocks... it loads all videos and image thumbnails from YouTube, and auto suggestions from Google and it loads pretty fast check it out: http://www.youtubeinstantsearch.com

Would it be possible for you to add support for App Store searches in addition to music, or do Apple's APIs not support that? If you had that, your search would easily replace iTunes's for me.

Nicely done!

EDIT: Oh, you have movie and TV show searches. Out of curiosity, what country are you in? Some results that come up for me aren't available in the US iTunes Store.

I am in the US.

Huh. That's strange. Why would the API return results not available in the country the script's being run from?

Awesome work man! To make it fully Google Instant, you would want to run the query against the first result in suggest. For instance, if you type in "la" you would get "lady gaga" instead of "L.A". Keep up the great work. :)

Hm. I am not sure if that's possible through Apple's API. I will take a look.

Though not specific to music (and would have mostly non-music suggestions), you could hit suggestqueries.google.com with a jsonp-formed request. (maybe throw "music" in front of the typed query or something to apply filtering).

That's a good find. Though I don't know if Google's suggestions will fit into Apple iTunes search.

From what I'm hearing, Android Market is the one that needs help with their search.

That is a definitely a good idea. I will look into it!

Also, I've been thinking to make a more mobile-optimized version of the site right now.

Congrats on this clear, uncluttered thinking. Most of us could learn from this. Also, nice mention by Jason Calacanis re: job offer! Next up - Mashable and TechCrunch...

Well done!

@LeslieCBarry | Iphso

$.post("/itunes/ajax", {'q': q, 'hell_yeah': 52012} <-- Hell yeah? :P

That's like a form key. :)

You're a smart man. You set this up for the referral program. Once TechCrunch and Mashable get a hold of this, you're gonna be rich.

Honestly speaking, I am not trying to make loads of money out of iTunes Instant. I can earn 5% of the commission which means it's only $60 if 1000 songs are being downloaded using my LinkShare referral links.

Though I do hope I will get the coverage of TechCrunch or Mashable. :)

Even so, you're offering functionality that people have wanted from iTunes for a long time, so you may be more successful than you think. :)

Totally.

I am working a new project on Android for security. My goal is to release it sometime within the next few months.

@stephenou you mean cluttered interface not cluster right?

Superstar!

Awesome work, Stephen!

Thanks, Daniel! :)

just soory it is not working in Slovakia

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