Muxtape is bringing back some retro-chic to the online music sharing community. It allows you to make a MP3 online ‘muxtape’ up to 12 songs at 10 MBytes each. The design and execution is dead simple but some how very appealing. It looks like someone made it in their bedroom when they were grounded by their parents. Its design is also clearly Apple inspired with its iphone-esque interface but i suspect it does not work on an iphone since the music is played via a Flash media player embedded on the site.

Take a look for yourself and I’ll be waiting to hear your very own muxtape.

TechCrunch – Already ran out
GigaOm – 1766 left as of posting
ReadWriteWeb – 2207 left as of posting
Ars Technica – All 2500 still available as of posting

The above list ranks the mega bloggers in order of douchbaggy-ness.

Update: Mashable also was graced with their very own 2500 invites.

The alpha release has a nice and polished Web 2.0 design with plenty of AJAX. As it is still a alpha release, many of the features are still not enabled. The site lets you log the time, place and details of the trips you have taken and organizes them via a visual map display or chronological drop down list. You can upload photos directly to driftr.com or link your flickr photos to their site via the flickr API.

Driftr allows you to enter places you stayed as well as places you ate at which I guess will eventually allow them to build a database of user reviews to compete with Yelp.com.

The current implementation is very basic but it has promise assuming more useful features are added. A few that come to mind are trip planning and peer recommendations. I’ve got a few more invites so let me know if you want to try it out.

Screen shots

BTW, the guys at the online backup startup Mozy can’t be too thrill neither when the Bulldog referred to them as ‘Moxy’. (Skip to 45:30).

I also noticed one little thing that there were more videos available if you just change the numeric id in the embed code. That led me to create a page on Premity.com, a company I started with a couple of other dudes.

A couple of people noticed the page and we even got a call from Nat Worden of TheStreet.com inquiring about our (un)association with the video startup currently it private beta. Little did we know the phone call was an interview for a post on TheStreet.com and made us out to be hackers trying to use their service to garner free publicity.

In reality, this ‘hack’ is not much of a hack at all. Since Hulu allows embedding of their videos outside of their site, even beta testers need to be able to copy and paste the embed code to their destination of choice. That meant anyone who wanted to embed the code onto their blog was free to do so. It just so happens that the video IDs are in ascending numerical order so I just made a page that randomly picks a number out of all of their currently available videos and displays the next 4.

It really is a pretty simple implementation of what Hulu intended for their beta users to be able to do so I would not really consider this a compromise at all of their beta service.

But it is a free world, so say what you will…

A couple sites who noticed our page:
Hulu’s Code Quickly Cracked
Premity Hijacks Hulu
I want a beta invite to Hulu
Private Beta Not So Private: Ad-Free Hulu Clips Disseminated

Here is their embedded top song player which is a cool feature to discover new music. You can register, login and Jigg all directly within this embeddable player which will help them grow their userbase virally.

Although their embed link feature from the player currently is broken so I had to browse the page source to find this code. That could be a problem but should be an easy fix for them.

Here is the description of their service from their own Website:

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux
* Automatically back up your important files quickly and easily

A friend of mine turned me on to the service last week and I have been playing around with it for a couple of days. So far it has worked very well but it is certainly in beta status. It is essentially a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) that makes the storage-in-a-cloud concept as transparent as possible. It literally looks like a local hard drive when it is connected. Locally cached files makes the file appear instantly on the drive while it works in the background to push it all up to Amazon’s servers without you sitting and waiting as in other services. Even if the computer crashes the service is smart enough to resume the upload when it reboots.

Where it shows as a beta product is in the feature set. Currently there is no easy way to map multiple drives using the same or different accounts. There are no privileges you can set for others to have limited access to your files or even make some of your files live on the internet via regular HTTP. Supposedly all of that will come in time at a fair price of a dollar a month or $20 a lifetime. Of course you will incur Amazon S3 charges for the storage and transfer fees but Jungle Disk isn’t seeing any of that.

Amazon S3 Pricing Structure

A typical scenario where this is extremely useful would be for someone who has a home computer as well as a work PC. You can map your Jungle Disk to both machines regardless where they are in the Internet. Files will appear in both locations just like magic. Or if you have a company with virtual employees across the world you can simply enable access to a Jungle Disk and suddenly everyone will be sharing and working on a network drive as if you are in the same network.

As a backup service it is not the cheapest around. Personally I will need close a terabyte of storage to backup my digital life and Amazon S3 will cost me around $150 a month whereas Mozy offers an unlimited backup service at $4.95/month. Where services like Mozy lacks is the transparency of file access.

I’ve been using it for just a couple of days and have been very impressed with the app. To access multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets I’ve even written a little script that allows me to ‘one-click’ swap between them. Let’s just hope Amazon hasn’t patented that as well…