Nick Dynice Interviews Lucas Gonze of Webjay who recently joined the Yahoo Music team. Lucas, along with Rob Kaye and Matthias Friedrich and other from the MusicBrainz team, Kevin Marks of Technorati, Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music and many others developed the XSPF (pronounced “spiff”) playlist format. The problem with existing online playlists formats is that there are no set standards and too many proprietary and closed formats. This makes it diffucult for both users and developers to share and created music playlists online. Yahoo Music gets this. Lucas, as part of the Yahoo Music team are helping to evangelize this format so that someday we might see native XSPF support in iTunes or Windows Media Player. In the meantime, The Yahoo Music Engine is taking advantage of this format. What makes XSPF great is: *Unlike M3U, XSPF is XML. *Unlike SMIL, XSPF is simple. *Unlike ASX, XSPF is open.

Is XSPF a microformat? It depends on who you ask. According to Tantek Çelik’s principles of microfomrats, Lucas makes the conclusion that it might could/should be. But it does not matter too much. Lucas’s other contributions to projects include CCMixter, Our Media, and Creative Commons applications of ID3, OGG, and SMIL.

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