Oh Hai, I Made U A Mixtape

But it’s not a mixtape, it’s a Muxtape: No Parents!

As with most people I’ve talked to, my attraction to Muxtape, the new streaming audio phenom, is definitely grounded in its simplicity. With his initial Tumbler post announcing the service’s launch, creator Justin said “expect rapid developments,” but I’m hoping they don’t come too rapidly.

It might not advance their business model (is there one?) to take it slowly but the lack of features on Muxtape is what makes it so exciting. No friend lists, no search function, and no bloody profile to fill out. You can’t have more than one mixtape per account. It’s beautiful.

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The move in this direction is a pleasant broader shift on the part of designers. Even Yahoo, usually a punchline to an untold joke about overcomplicated interfaces, just backed Flickr’s launch of video hosting that restricts length to 90 seconds. No full episodes of Family Guy there, the goal seems to be for people to upload, literally, moving pictures.

Whether either of these sites will remain in their uncluttered state for long is a mystery. Both could very well begin deploying “improvements” as soon as their basic architecture seems stable enough. I’m sure doing so will improve their bounce rate and their site-visit times and other monetizable stats, but for the sake of good design I hope they remain as they are.