I love the recent trend we’re seeing in simplified sites/apps. Back in January I raved all about the super simple bookmarking app, Instapaper (which is still one of my most visited sites on a daily basis). Then of course I’ve written about FriendFeed at least two dozen times on various sites. At its core what do I like about it so much? It’s simplicity. Same goes for Twitter – even though I would like to see a few more features, too many and you could kill a good thing.

The latest truly excellent simple site is Muxtape. From what I gather via Twitter and FriendFeed, quite a few people have been trying out and raving about this app the past couple days. I found it via Laughing Squid.

So what is it? Well assuming you’re not too much younger than myself, you probably spent your teenage years, 20s or 30s making mix tapes. Before the days of MP3s let alone CD burners, this was how you took music on the go or gave it to friends. It was something of an art form to squeeze just the right amount music onto a tape. You had to pick songs carefully – you didn’t want a song to get cut off before you had to switch sides or worse – the tape ended.

Tapes were kind of expensive and annoying to carry around. There was an incentive in not messing up or joking around with lame songs. If you gave a tape to someone, you knew they were probably going to listen all the way through – to every single song. Fast-forwarding was such a pain in the ass. As such, the songs had to be good. They had to matter.

Muxtape takes us back to that time – if only virtually. The site gives you 12 slots to fill with 12 songs in MP3 format. Each song must be from a different artist (seemingly for piracy concerns, though it works well artistically here) and you cannot create multiple muxtapes.

Just as with real mix tapes, making muxtapes is a real time investment. Depending on how slow your upload time is – and for most of us it’s likely very slow – you have to sit a wait for each individual song to upload (you can only do one song at a time).

Every user gets a simple URL to spread their songs around. The songs can be streamed from anywhere that has an Internet connection and playing them is as simple as clicking on their title.

You can find my first Muxtape here.

Anyone else make any to spread around yet?

One note: songs do have to be in said MP3 format – meaning songs bought from the Apple store will not work (unless you burn them to a CD then re-rip them).