Placelists
Coca-Cola Placelists was a project over a year in the making, involving developers ranging from Atlanta, to NYC, from Stockholm, to Silicon Valley. A collaboration between Coca-Cola, Facebook, and Spotify, it was one of the first applications to make use of the Spotify App API while it was still in beta, as well as leveraging Facebook’s Places and Events APIs.
The project began in Facebook’s Shipyard program, where several of my coworkers were sent to work on rapid-prototyping an app bridging the aforementioned APIs in a branded project for Coca-Cola Music. Several months later, the alpha build helped clarify the final specs for the project, and I was tapped to help spearhead the beta build.
The months of changing features and designs showed in the alpha code, and it was decided that we would rewrite the entire frontend Spotify App from the ground up, to match the completely new creative design the Beta was receiving, as well as to serve as a fresh start now that the blueprint was set. In addition to building the frontend templates and styles for the new beta, we were also tasked with making the Beta responsive, as an interim solution until the native iOS app was released. This, in turn, meant the beta had to intelligently detect whether it’s being run within Spotify or within a regular browser, and be capable falling back to Spotify’s more limited REST API when in the latter environment.
The end result was Coca-Cola Placelists, which allows users to select a location or event on Facebook, and either add or vote music up the queue in the virtual location. Further more, hooking up the iOS app or the Spotify app to speakers in the physical location or event allowed users to let their audience vote on what to listen to, letting people have a say in the music, both in the real world and online.
