Just attended a great panel on ubiquitous music which not only refers to music being everywhere but whole gamut of apps and hardware that facilitate the social network of listening, creating and sharing music. Another way of thinking about it: "devices and applications that allow people to express their musical identity." A lot of the ideas here are also bound with mobile computing.

Interesting presentations by folks from Nokia, American University (the guy who does the "Walkman Busting" radio show for NPR). Atau Tanaka from Sony CSL Paris and Layla Gayle from Viktoria Inst. in Sweden showed off their next gen devices, one which allows people to create music in realtime through a network (Tanaka) and one which makes music as the user walks through the urban environment.

One of the most interesting was a social application for Pocket PC, called tunA, which allows users to listen to their own music or see playlists from other users with a WiFi network and listen in to what others are hearing. There was a messaging component as well. I don't know what the app was written in, but I could totally see something like this written in Flash and using Flash Com Server to maintain the connections.

In sum, a really thought-provoking panel on social computing with music as the target medium. I' still have some things to digest here. Looking forward to exploring the sites I've posted above!