Well well well! You all thought that we was messing with you, didn't you? You thought that the WebJam 8 win was nothing more than an elaborate hoax designed to bag some awesome prizes, didn't you? No, friends, it wasn't (though I'm totally going to do that for the next WebJam) for now the time has arrived...

You know, very special occasions - those of cultural and historic importance - demand certain graces: and I think it's fair that an announcement as auspicious as this be marked with both the Blink AND Marquee tags:

!!! TURNTUBELIST HAS BEEN RELEASED !!!

As the flashing and scrolling have made blinkingly apparent, Turntubelist has been released! Indeed it has certainly been some time coming.

Perhaps a tale of hardship and mateship in these uncertain economic times might stir your soul, and bring you closer to understanding the intricate genius inherent in Turntublelist - The Web App....

Turntubelist: The early weeks

Like most useless-to-the-general-masses inventions, Turntubelist was born out of petty necessity: Keeping those house parties jumping by loading two YouTube videos in separate Firefox tabs was getting tedious. But we had the music in our blood and no one was going to keep us down.

So we loaded two instances of the YouTube web-page into iframes. Granted, this made transitions and song-selection smoother - but with two videos sitting sidewise like so many... um, turntables, the cross-fader just about wrote itself.

Thanks to the nice YouTube APIs and the wonders of jQuery, a working demo was completed in a couple of hours - and it seemed pretty fun.

The proceeding month was spent writing an extensible javascript foundation (with a passable crossfader algorithm) and knocking up a suitably awesome design. "Cross-fade YouTube videos and create video playlists" was the simple idea we dropped on the WebJam crowd in September of 2008. The presentation, and Henry Tapia's sweet design skills, were enough to give Turntubelist a victory: despite some tough competition.

With a WebJam win under our belts we were sure that international web-nerd super-stardom would follow, and Turntubelist would be bigger than Facebook My Space.

Turntubelist: the boring times

There was only one slight issue. We hadn't "finished" it yet. So we spent the next 5 months working on it, at a rate of about 1 line of code a week. If nothing else, it taught us these valuable lessons: don't add features you don't truly need, and it sure is hard to call something finished.

Turntubelist: the that's-good-enough period

But our slowly-but-surely approach finally paid off, for we lovingly announce Turntubelist "beta". Break out your killer DJ chops and get busy on the virtual wheels-of-steel: search for a set-worthy collection of YouTube music videos, and add them to your playlists. Then stun the crowd with track-after-track of dance floor stompers - seamlessly mixed for their pleasure! If you just need to dance - switch on the auto-play mode, and if you're a DJ from way back - get tricky with the advanced set/cue features and keyboard shenanigans.

And if you come up with that monster playlist - hit the "publish this set" button and post the link here: craziest set wins. Ready? Go!