Category Archives: Social Media

Why I already love Spotify

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I’ve been looking for something to really satisfy my music needs. iTunes got old fast, I hate anything that comes standard with Windows, and other players just had crappy interfaces. And that’s just local clients. When it comes to online music streaming, you’ve got the hit-and-miss nature of Grooveshark’s library, Pandora’s station model (with ads), and other competitors. They’re OK, but again–I’ve been looking for something incredible, not just mediocre.

Spotify is that incredible solution.

It rolled out in the US yesterday and I managed to snag an invite code from a complete stranger on Twitter after peddling around for about 10 minutes looking for a way to get in that didn’t involve spoofing the service to look like I was from the UK. It’s been in Europe for a while, but talks with music labels delayed its release in the US.

When you sign up for the service, there are three tiers–Free, Unlimited, and Premium. The free version has ads, and doesn’t let you stream on your phone. Unlimited takes away the ads, and Premium gives you Spotify on your phone and enables you to listen offline. All three plans include the Spotify client, which acts as a library organizer for your local music.

At first I couldn’t figure out why they went with a desktop client. With Pandora’s new HTML5 redesign, I thought that music streaming services had figured out that we want a web-based music experience. But the more I’ve played with it, the more I LOVE the client–so much more than I ever loved iTunes.

The strength of the client is the fact that it’s the perfect hybrid between the music you already have and the music you don’t. You can easily switch between online streaming and your local library without skipping a beat. And get this–you can even create mixed playlists with local music AND online streaming music.

It handles local music extremely well. Without me having to do a thing, it found all my music and brought it into a clean interface. It’s also instantly searchable, which is a big plus for me. Now I’ve finally got the tool that marries local music and online music, and lets me manage it all from one slick interface.

Spotify has also tapped into the social scene by adding the ability to connect with Facebook. When I finally set it up, it showed all my friends who had Spotify (most of them in Europe) and their public playlists with the option to subscribe.

Brilliant, if you ask me.

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Google+ Huddle

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One of my favorite features about the new Google+ product is Huddle. It’s not in the browser (at least not yet), so you’ll need to download the mobile app to use it.

For me, Huddle will act as a replacement for GroupMe, allowing me to easily text message groups of people and carry on conversations with group members on my phone.This kind of functionality turned out to be crucial for collaboration between me and my group members for school this last year. And if Google can perfect the formula (and the app heads to iOS soon), I’ll be totally on board.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google will develop Huddle further, and whether or not it’ll be accessible from the browser. I find that when I’m at my desk and need to send a text, I usually pull up Google Voice in the browser. And with the Google Voice extension for Chrome, I can do everything I need (even make and receive calls in Gmail) via the browser. I’d like to see this kind of functionality and flexibility included in Google+.

If you haven’t checked out Huddle yet, head over to the Android Market and get the Google+ app. And feel free to add me to your Circles: ssbean {at} gmail {dot} com.

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First Look at Google+

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After scouring the Internet for a way to get into Google+, I finally connected with a friend I met at the Google I/O conference in May and he sent me an invite. I logged in, set up my profile, and started tinkering.

One of the first things I tried out was the Hangout feature. The idea is that you let people know you’re “hanging out” and wouldn’t mind joining in a group conversation with web cams. At one point I had four people in a hangout (the limit is 10) and we could all see each and hear each other just fine. And when someone was talking, the video on my screen would enlarge their video. I’ll admit–this was my first group video chat online. And it was really cool.

Next I checked out Sparks. It’s less prevalent than some of the other features, but from what I can tell so far, it’ll be a great feature. You can add topics of interest and then click on them at any time to see the latest news surround that topic. When I searched for “tennis” as a topic, it suggested “tennis wimbledon 2011″ and showed a bunch of  news articles about Federer’s loss to Tsonga.

Circles are brilliant. The idea of being able to categorize your contacts into easily manageable groups and then share content with just those groups is something Facebook was never quite able to master. I think the Circles feature will be what really drives the success for Google Plus.

Another really great thing is the new black bar at the top. When I’m viewing other Google products, the black bar is there and shows me a notification count as people share things, respond to my comments, or do anything else notification-worthy. It’s a simple but great way to integrate the social aspect of the web into every day tasks online.

The mobile app is great, too. Now you can take pictures and have them privately uploaded to Picasa, where you can decide if you’d like to make them public for others to see. I’ve been waiting for an auto-upload feature for a while now, and this is it.

So far I love it. Given enough time and enough friends who join, I would gladly get rid of Facebook and move over to Google Plus exclusively. Now someone needs to figure out an easy way to get pictures out of Facebook and into Picasa so I can pick up my Google Plus social life where I left off on Facebook.

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