This must be the week — if not the day — to launch new designs of products and services under new ownership. Good friend, and former colleague at Wired, Stephen Blake played a large role in today’s launch of the new CNET-owned mp3.com redesign. XHTML, CSS, Sliding Doors, and rounded corners… oh my.<sarcasm>Apparently, they have no problem going head-to-head with the redesign of Blogger. Figures. I work at Wired, try to teach Stephen everything I know, then he leaves Wired not long after me, joins CNET, and tries to steal our thunder with a redesign of his own.</sarcasm> Although he’s probably secretly cursing us for the same thing.
In all seriousness, congratulations to Stephen, Tim Mitchell (another friend/former colleague), and the entire CNET music team on getting mp3.com to beta stage. To those who click over to mp3.com expecting the same service from 1998, think again. You won’t find the abundance of downloads of local garage bands from Santa Monica or Duluth. Instead, you’ll find categorizations, artist info, audio streams, and summaries on music-related technology. The download service was transitioned to a subdomain of download.com.