Godfather Robert Scoble hereby anoints a new buzz favorite: Soundcloud.
I really dig Soundcloud. They have great product discipline and stellar chops at making software.
But I worry about the buzz among techies, because it is such a stupid and brutish force. For example, Scoble describes Soundcloud this way: What is SoundCloud? A way to share music and audio files.
Uh, no. Scoble just described all the litle file hosting services like Fileden.com, Filehut, DenOfFiles, PutYourMP3sHere.com, etc. That’s just simply plain wrong.
Soundcloud is web tools for the practical work of making music. For example, musicians often need to share huge files like a one-file recording of an hourlong jam, in WAV format, which doesn’t really work with standard software. In my experience you need tech chops, a generous ISP, a FTP client, about a day, and plenty of cuss words to make it happen. Or Soundcloud.
But whatever. No point bitching. As much as the attention paid to comparable buzz startups like Delicious and Twitter can be vapid and fickle, Delicious, Twitter, and Soundcloud are all great work, and it’s good when the good guys win.