ArtistServer now offers support for "XSPF," which stands for "XML Shareable Playlist Format" in the playlist system.
You'll see the new button next to the playlists which have songs by members who have upgraded, which is the same as the Podcasting feature.
These options require more of the service's resources and requires me to scale the service at a faster rate - so in order to ensure that expenses don't get out of hand, I've selected to make these two aspects of the service open to upgraded accounts only.
Why would you care about XSPF?
- it's support by Yahoo in their Yahoo Music Engine player
- it's also a somewhat new standard for playlists
- it's the format used at WebJay (which was just acquired by Yahoo)
- and this cool little Flash mp3 player supports the format: http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net
I wonder how much. I didn't see that one coming. It makes me wonder how many times Last.fm has been approached. Seems like Google would be trying to talk to them.