In the old days, when people had stereos (remember those), if you wanted to listen to a friend’s music collection, you had to go to their house. Today, you check out their iLike playlists on Facebook, their Last.fm profile, or any of dozens of other social music sharing widgets and Websites. Now you can add Reble.FM to that list. Reble.FM is free software you download to your desktop that lets you stream songs from any friend’s PC that is also online and is running the Reble.FM client. It just launched in public beta today. Says founder and key-coder Nick Meyer:

Playing music on my friend’s computer should feel just like playing a song on my hard-drive, and you should be able to add any of your friends’ music to playlists. That’s what we’re going for with Reble.

Reble is a scrappy YCombinator startup. The software is built on the Jabber open-source instant messaging platform You are basically IMing with your friends and hooking into their iTunes or other music library. You can only see the music of friends on your contact list, and can only stream a song if no one else is listening to it at the same moment. It is a one-to-one system.

But the more friends you invite, the bigger the music library that you can access. The software only works on Windows machines right now, and only streams DRM-free MP3s. Eventually, it will let you buy songs that you like from digital music stores like iTunes or Amazon.

The download-only client will be a nonstarter for some users, especially since there are many other Web-based options for sharing your playlists with your friends. It does beat uploading all your songs to some Website, or only being able to listen to a random shuffle of your friends’ songs. But even the Web-based music sharing services are making on-demand music streaming possible. Last.fm, for instance, now lets you stream any song three times in full before reverting to its default random shuffle. For those of you who try out Reble, please tell us your impressions in comments.

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A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.

The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.

Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.

The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.

One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.

The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.

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