I've been sucked into the music version of Twitter. Twitter, as many of you already know, is basically a series of status updates, each no longer than a hundred-forty characters, and collected into a "This is what I'm thinking at this moment" list to which friends and fans can subscribe. (I say "fans" because many notable and famous people tweet (post to their Twitter accounts), allowing the rest of us to have a sense of what they're doing and thinking randomly throughout the day.) I opened a Twitter account years ago but didn't use it until Jake, one of Amy's best friends, started following me there and I was inspired to take another look at the site. Now I'm following artists I love (musicians, writers, web comic creators, and so forth) as well as friends both close and distant. It's a wonderful service... and it will even update your status over at your Facebook account if you have one.
Blip.fm takes this simple idea and adds to it the ability to include a song. The idea of the site is basically this: you gain access to millions of streaming songs; you ostensibly have your own music station and a station programmed by your friends (if you have any friends on the service); and an audience of music enthusiasts. For me it's been Twitter with tracks and a way to discover new music. And it's terribly addictive.
Blip.fm (click here to access my page) is integrated with Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr, LiveJournal, Jaiku, and Last.fm's audioscrobbler. What this means is that whenever you, uh, "blip", the site posts your blip in these various locations. Let's say I write a status update saying, "In precisely nine days Amy and I will have been married for twenty-three minutes," (because I did) and attach to it the song "Please Forgive Me" by David Gray. Blip.fm then sends this post to Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumbler, LJ, and Jaiku where it is posted as an entry native to the destination site. (With Last.fm the song information is sent to update what you're listening to, but more on that below.) I've set up my Twitter account to control my Facebook status updates, so whenever I, uh, "blip", Twitter takes that information and sends it along to FB, making my original blip look like this:
In precisely nine days Amy and I will have been married for twenty-three minutes.
http://blip.fm/~2hcvi
Not only can you know what I'm thinking during the day, you can also hear the music playing in my head (or in my car) while I'm thinking it.
Last.fm (click here to visit my page) is rather like LibraryThing, but instead of cataloging your books you add your favorite artists to your library and create a master online playlist of your entire collection (as well as each artist's entire collection). You can "love" tracks so they're more likely to replay in the random playlist mix, ban tracks so they never play again (as much as I love him, Mike Patton's "Adult Themes for Voice" doesn't need to be on regular rotation), and find out what your friends listen to and how often. It's run a bit like Wikipedia where you can update artist's articles with information and images. I found a Canadian garage band from 2008 using the name Mungus and took over the wiki page by quoting our SonicBids epk, adding pictures of the band, and uploading the most recent mix of our album. Click here to check out the Mungus Last.fm page. The site keeps track of what you listen to and how often you listen to it, and makes suggestions of new artists based on this information (which is why Blip.fm sending information to Last.fm is useful, though in a background kind of way).
I'm discovering so much new music on these two sites it's staggering. I did a search for "Digging in the Dirt" just to see Mungus's version pop up and found an amazing mash-up of Nelly Furtado's "Turn Off the Light" and Peter Gabriel's "Digging" which then led to two hours of tracking down little known PG mash-ups and covers. I haven't had this much fun since Napster didn't suck.