spokeo – Consolidating all your social networks

This seems to be the fashion at present. Everyone is trying to be first to launch (an effective) social network aggregator, which will consolidate a users social networks.

Check out:

spokeo – Spokeo sees itself as a kind of RSS reader for social networks

But the real rival is socialstream – The google sponsored social networking project that aimed to interconnect existing networks. Not live at the time of writing, but allows users to post content (photos, blogs, video, audio, events) to any participating network.

Apparently Yahoo are building one too…..Yahoo mosh

All in all, making the users life easier by having the ability to read all your friend’s updates in one location in a system akin to the Facebook feed is obviously appelaing.

Will this work? Facebook’s platform has been an obvious success, but I wonder how long it will take for these aggregators to get traction…..

Sick of Myspace, Facebook and Bebo – Why not try something slicker?

Virb - They say Virb “offering sleek and easy-to-customize profile design. The details on various features, for example music and video player, are quite polished – even the ads look nice”. It is not bad – not amazing though.

Trig – Love the look of this site – the black and 20 shades of gray. If you are not a kid and have a band – Trig is for you.

Purevolume - purely music-oriented and the profiles are divided between artists and listeners. Profiles aren’t bad – lacks good customisation

my.9rules - looks good but a bit too similair to Purevolume – ok

Pownce - Don’t like twitter, don’t like this – but what do I know – people love this stuff

Threadless – Love this – love the t-shirts. – harnessing the power of community for commercial purposes, Threadless enables users to submit their own T-Shirt designs; the community votes for the very best, which then become a part of Threadless’ official catalog.

Shelfari - If you are a bookworm or too scared to join a book club openly – Shelfari is for you. It is a community of book lovers which you can browse by user, by interest groups or by books themselves.

Beautiful Society – The site revolves around the concept of “favorite things” – but is not as beautiful as the other sites on here

Humble Voice – a designers wet dream…….

Finetune iGoogle Widget

Finetune, my favourite internet radio site (see below for review) which is home to some of my best playlists, has just released an iGoogle gadget/widget.

The widget lets you access your Finetune profile directly from your iGoogle homepage. The homepage of the widget is here, click on the “add to Google” button to add it to your iGoogle page.

Other Finetune goodies include Finetune Desktop and Finetune’s homepage optimized for the Wii.

Slacker – new competitor to Last FM and Pandora

Slacker is new on the scene and looks like a good bit of kit. It feels the music discovery market is still open and as such takes the music disocvery model that little bit further by combining satellite radio, a digital audio player, and custom WiFi radio with personalization and discovery.

Unfortunately Slackers have something against the English (actuially against my ISP address more specifically), and as such I can’t use all the clever crap I have rambled on about. Well you Yanks can keep your clever crap and I’ll have to revert to using the awful Last f.m. Damn you yanks…..

Looks like everything this blog is about is going to end………

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken action against several internet radio stations that allow listeners to participate in the selection of music to be broadcast.

So everything I write about is going to go. I am not sad due to my blog dying a death but being the piki I am , I love free stuff and I love free internet radio staions. Everything I have written about will be folklore once the RIAA have their way.

The RIAA apparently fears that interactive radio services that give a limited degree of choice to listeners will adversely affect music retail sales.

Give a monkeys. The RIAA want to restrict the number of tracks that can be played from any one album and playing no more than four from any particular artist within a three hour period.

Get on the petition, lets not say goodbye to these awesome freebies

Wakoopa: Last.fm For Desktop Applications

Last.fm does for music what Dutch startup Wakoopa wants to do for your desktop applications. Like Last.fm, Wakoopa uses a downloaded tracker, except if follows how often you use applications instead of listen to music. Similarly, Wakoopa has also built a Rails-powered social website around the data, letting users share their preferences with friends, write reviews of their favorite application, and download new ones.

Will this get traction – Doubt it

source Tech Crunch

Pandora to boot me out

If you live outside of the U.S. and enjoy listening to customized radio stations on Pandora, brace yourself for some bad news. The site will be shutting you out starting tonight. Registered users who access the service from outside the U.S. received a warning email yesterday letting them know that this will be happening.

Pandora operates under Section 114 of the DMCA, which gives them a clear process for paying rights holders in the U.S. There is no international equivalent of the DMCA, and so to operate legally in other countries, Pandora must sign deals with rights holders directly. That means separate deals with labels and publishers for each song, an extremely difficult and time consuming task.

Pandora has always made it clear on the site that it is for U.S. users only, and requires a U.S. zip code for registration. That didn’t stop many international users from registering anyway, using “90210″ or another famous zip code to get access to the service. Now, with IP-based filtering, users will be forced to go through proxy servers or other complicated mechanisms for getting to the music.

I spoke with CTO Tom Conrad this evening about the change. He says Pandora has been working on international rights deals for nearly two years now, and they hope to have enough deals done in the UK and Canada to launch in those countries soon. Other markets will take longer, he says.

The email sent to users is below.

This isn’t the only bad news recently for Pandora. Along with other Internet radio companies, they have also been fighting the RIAA over revisions to the fee structure they must pay for playing music online. The rates they pay are significantly more than satellite providers pay, and terrestrial radio stations pay nothing to play music. Two very brave congressmen, Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL), have proposed legislation that would require Internet radio startups to pay no more than satellite providers, which should allow many Internet radio startups to stay in business. Read more about the legislation on the Pandora blog and SaveNetRadio.

social music sites

Qloud

People powered music site

Qloud , is a music search service with social features. You can search for artists, songs, keywords, styles and more, with Qloud serving up a list of tracks that you can preview on the site. You can then save the tracks to your favorites, email the results, link to the page or buy the individual tracks on iTunes, AOL Music Now or Amazon. There are all kinds of social filters, too – like how recently the tracks have been rated, how highly they’ve been rated and which tracks have been tagged or played the most. You can also narrow your search based on the demographics of the listeners.

It’s a neat service that looks incredibly slick, although the interface takes a lot of getting used to – I constantly forget to clear my old search before conducting a new one.

Project Opus

Here’s another good reason to stop buying useless, DRM-laden music from the labels. ProjectOpus is a music community along the lines of the excellent PureVolume, connecting fans and artists at a local level. The service seems to be free for everyone involved, and ProjectOpus makes its money from paid downloads. From the site:

Project Opus™ is an online music community designed to support artists, fans and local music. It is a single point of contact for discovery of new music. We have two goals:
1. make it incredibly easy for bands to self-publish music, find their audience and then get paid for the sale and licensing of their music, and
2. make it incredibly easy for fans to find music they love and support the artists that make it.

To give them their due, ProjectOpus is one of the most forward-thinking players in this space: they allow users to create their own sharable playlists and export them to Webjay

Music Hawk

MusicHawk has many of the features you’d expect from a music-themed community – profile pages, networks of friends, messaging, a band search, favorites and list of the most popular and active band pages. You can add MySpace slideshows, music players, maps and other Flash-based add-ons to your page

MusicHawk is a decent attempt at building a social network around music, but somehow they seem to have forgotten the most important thing: the music itself. Band directories are fine, but I expect most users would rather listen to the music than read band profiles.

And ofcourse there is finetune. Love that shit

Some of the best music sites out there

FineTune

Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch . What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.

Pandora

Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses.

Last.Fm

last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. I actually can’t stand it.

MOG

MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like.

RadioBlogClub

radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.

MyStrands

MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together.

iLike

iLike is an iTunes plug-in that makes your music library more social. It tracks what you’re listening too and recommends songs and people with similar tastes. It hooks in nicely with the iTunes interface and recommends music as you’re playing songs. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and the recommendations were good. They also have a widget for MySpace that is formatted to sit nicely in the “Music” section of the profile.

iJigg

iJigg is a digg-esque music discovery service that I had a lot of fun playing with. Users vote on individual songs and the most popular rise to the top of the front page. You can’t do any “related artists” with iJigg, but you can browse by genre so that you can target your music discovery. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so you can share it with friends. As this service gets more popular, I think it will be a great way for bands to get discovered.

Gracenote, another online music site that is not free

Gracenote, allows you to better manage, enjoy and discover digital media (music included). Well it does little to meet my needs at work whilst I listen to music, it is not free and as I am an internet user with an uber short concentratyion span, I cannot be bothered to read all their spiel. Why is this better than my standard Windows Media player? i don’t know and nor do I care, The new version of Windows Media Player manages all my music just fine, and I’ll stick to that thanks.