A 23-year-old software developer in Atlanta has fixed the YouTube listening experience with a simple app called Tubalr. It searches YouTube for the top songs from a particular artist and arranges them in a continuous playlist. If you'd like to mix it up, a "similar" option searches related artists on Last.fm and delivers their top videos on YouTube to your playlist. When you search the same band twice, it rearranges the playlist so you don't get bored. That's it.
"I was surfing YouTube and found some amazing HD music videos," says creator Cody Stewart, "and I thought it would be a cool idea to play those back to back without having all the other stuff I didn't find interesting -- mainly the 10,000s of comments about cats and dogs."
Stewart, neither a surfer nor a Tuba player, created the app in order to show off his skills during a job search. He says he based the no-fuss interface on Google. Part of what makes the app so simple and slick is that it doesn't make money. Unlike free playlist sites such as Pandora, the only ads you'll see are in the videos themselves.
So far about 124,000 searches have been completed by 2,000 users on the app. Not bad for a project that started as resume fodder.