So, what just happened at F8, the Facebook developer's conference? In a word, Facebook has promised a re-imagined content and personalization platform for the Web.
If you believe the F8 conference hype, on Sept. 29 when Timeline opens to the public, Facebook is the place where every single inch of your life can be displayed, from the time you were born, to the time you die. It's also going to be the place where every single piece of media you share and consume will be distributed to everyone you know.
Turntable.fm, the group music-listening startup that took the Internet by storm this summer, has launched a redesign of its Web interface. The new UI is designed to help users better navigate from room to room, where they can either listen to a curated playlist of music or step up and play DJ themselves.
To help guide new users into the most appropriate room, Turntable has added a new section called "DJs needed," which lists only rooms that are in need in need of more people to play tunes. You can also filter rooms by total number of listeners, how recently they were created or just show a random list.
On-demand music streaming service Spotify will be deeply integrated into Facebook, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced at the f8 developer conference today.
The new integration will allow Facebook users to stream Spotify tracks directly from the news feed or from one's own profile, where their top tracks will be listed. The partnership is also designed to better facilitate music recommendations among friends.
Tech and music enthusiasts in the United States were overjoyed when Spotify finally launched here in July. The on-demand music streaming service had been all the rage in Europe for a few years, but its U.S. launch was reportedly delayed by ongoing negotiations with major music labels.
Spotify has been up and running in the United States for nearly three months, much to everyone's delight. Well, maybe not everyone. A few independent record labels have pulled their music catalogs from Spotify over concerns that the service just isn't lucrative enough for them, GigaOm reported earlier this week.
Pandora, the customized Internet radio streaming service, has pushed out a redesigned interface to all users. The new UI comes with an added bonus: the company has removed its infamous 40 hour listening cap, enabling users to streaming an unlimited amount of music for free.
The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.
There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers' conference until the fall this year, after having hosted it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement and announce where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.
So, what are we looking for? Facebook's recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook's new features have been to counter Google's push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.
Mobile Roadie, a self-service app development platform for brands and music, launched its system in a crowded but fragmented China platform ecosystem today.
The China mobile application market is characterized by confusion right now. Already-strong local players like Tencent have launched mobile app platforms to sell apps for Android and iOS. But those platforms depend on partnerships with companies in Europe and the United States.
Mobile Roadie is tearing up that formula. It's a Western company that's letting local developers make apps for themselves.
Music streaming service MOG has announced that it is adding a free, advertising-supported subscription plan. The move, which is almost certainly a response to the recent U.S. launch of Spotify, is designed to attract more people to the service's 11 million song library of all-you-can-stream music.
Previously, MOG was only available in one of two paid "premium" flavors. European sensation Spotify launched in the U.S. with two premium tiers as well, but crucially included a free subscription service with ads and some modest limitations on streaming. Spotify picked up 1.4 million American users in its first few weeks.
The long-awaited iPhone app for Turntable.fm, this summer's hottest group listening service, is now live in the iTunes App Store.
The service, which lets people play music for eachother's animated avatars in virtual rooms, is sort of like a virtual DJ night broken down by genre. People take turns playing tracks and other users can cast their vote for songs as being "lame" or "awesome" and chat with each other in real time. If the desktop experience seemed cool, the service feels even more at home on the iPhone.
Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the United States, has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to build an Internet radio service similar to Pandora and Last.fm.
Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest's massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential "Pandora killer" by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora's. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.
