The service WILL launch today - iOS app and website. It will work with Spotify, Rdio and iTunes.
I hope at least one of two things happen - they somehow support Xbox Music (ZunePass), but I doubt that will happen since it isn't web based and probably has no interface...OR Rdio gets more music.
I'm disappointed by the description (but I never used wearehunted; if I had I probably wouldn't be surprised). I was really hoping for an easy way to share individual songs over twitter (in a way that doesn't require me or the people that might listen to the songs to have external accounts). Right now I use embedded youtube videos which has gaps in coverage, quality, etc.... Twitter might have the resources and influence to pull something like that off.
The flip side being that if it's easy for people to share songs, and there's an easy way to play a stream of songs w/in twitter, then you get "discovery" from curated playlists.
Right now, the service is available in the US, Canada,
the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Over time, we
will bring the service to Android as well as to more
countries.
Well, that's a bummer. Why do they include services like iTunes and Spotify if they were going to limit the product's availability? I doubt that I'd use the service regularly, but I was excited to check it out.
Playing with it now and it seems pretty good. The trending chart is obviously full of the usual suspects (Psy is #1 right now). The emerging chart is actually quite good. I haven't heard of anyone on it but already heard a few good songs. The suggested chart (based on artists on you follow which the app finds automatically when you link your Twitter account) is also quite good. It's finding me tracks by artists I know but haven't heard in a while and a few new ones too.
The play interface is a bit clunky. I've already accidentally switched to the next track and there doesn't seem to be a way to seek so when I went back I had to start the previous track from the beginning again.
The app makes sharing what you're listening to pretty easy and includes a link to the track on the music service you've linked your account with (Spotify or Rdio).
Search is a bit funny. It says 'search for artists' but really just returns a list of twitter users matching your search term. I could see twitter introducing some sort of artist account. It can't be that hard to verify an artists authenticity through checking if they have music on Rdio, Spotify, or iTunes.
It seems like it could be a good service and is soemthing that will be useful to me immediately but they do have a few things (mainly the playback interface and search) to work out.
"You can download Twitter #music from the App Store today, or enjoy the web version, which will be rolling out over the next few hours: music.twitter.com."
So the web component will be rolling out later today. The app is available and working.
I also found that infuriating. Maybe management is working the engineers really hard or something. It just seems weird that they couldn't even implement the most basic handling for a view that only contains a single button.
Can you play full songs from Spotify on the app with a standard Spotify account? Since the Spotify app only allows full catalog access on mobile devices with a premium subscription, it seems strange that they would allow the Twitter Music app to do this.
Bands now have a strong reason to get very spammy on twitter. Hope it doesn't go the way of MySpace, which ended up being LinkedIn for people who want to promote their band. (there was a lot of other things wrong with MySpace, but when it just became a bunch of bands spamming each other, anyone who wasn't a band had little reason to be there anymore)
Not about Data plan, actually. When I was in Delhi, a $25/mo data plan gave me unlimited data usage with 100GB fair usage limit. I still could not listen to music and video all day - the battery bottleneck is much tighter.
The trend is towards capped usage, which is a shame. Unlimited data was the norm in the US until recently.
As an American who living in Canada though, you guys are screwed beyond belief. My girlfriend pays for internet BT THE SERVICE. I think the android plan allowed twitter/AIM/Facebook, and BlackBerry was email/bbm or something. That's the kind of thing Americans only imagine as a dystopian future: http://www.microsiervos.com/images/TieredInternet.jpg
still not exactly sure what it does. it pulls music from other services based on trending stuff on twitter? who would want that? so much hype for nothing...
Well that now makes the second Twitter product without an Android launch strategy. The first, Vine, looks like it'll flame out by the time they ever toss a half broken app across the corporate firewall. Are they running out of cash or something? Their competition doesn't seem to be having a problem with supporting more than one platform.
Edit: I'd also like the point out the irony of hitting "Play Full Tracks", picking Rdio, then immediately being presented with a Facebook logo and login option but no Twitter SSO. /facepalm
I've yet to see a beautiful web app on mobile not be a sluggish buggy mess. Twitter's mobile web app at first look decent but it's sooooo sllllllllooooowww and unresponsive on a quad core phone.
Forecast.io's mobile site is the first time I've seen any app or browser instance cause a phone to lock up and never recover. I'm suspecting that's a GPU driver bug.
I don't use mobile sites, so I don't have any perspective on that. I'm just irritated at all the things that are mobile-only when they don't need to be. The best way to get the web to look better on mobile is to encourage developers to start thinking about the web again.
It won't let me connect my Spotify account. I'm going to assume it's from so many people trying to do the same thing. Looks interesting from what little I can do with it without the connection.
43 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadEdit: added 'Today' to title to clarify.
The service WILL launch today - iOS app and website. It will work with Spotify, Rdio and iTunes.
I hope at least one of two things happen - they somehow support Xbox Music (ZunePass), but I doubt that will happen since it isn't web based and probably has no interface...OR Rdio gets more music.
The flip side being that if it's easy for people to share songs, and there's an easy way to play a stream of songs w/in twitter, then you get "discovery" from curated playlists.
The play interface is a bit clunky. I've already accidentally switched to the next track and there doesn't seem to be a way to seek so when I went back I had to start the previous track from the beginning again.
The app makes sharing what you're listening to pretty easy and includes a link to the track on the music service you've linked your account with (Spotify or Rdio).
Search is a bit funny. It says 'search for artists' but really just returns a list of twitter users matching your search term. I could see twitter introducing some sort of artist account. It can't be that hard to verify an artists authenticity through checking if they have music on Rdio, Spotify, or iTunes.
It seems like it could be a good service and is soemthing that will be useful to me immediately but they do have a few things (mainly the playback interface and search) to work out.
Edit: The website is now live: https://music.twitter.com
It seems to me like Google Drive all over again, nothing new to see but since its a big company launching something, hype!
Public facing landing page for about a week that asks you to sign in then just does nothing, not even an error?
Can't even be arsed looking at it now after that mess.
"You can download Twitter #music from the App Store today, or enjoy the web version, which will be rolling out over the next few hours: music.twitter.com."
So the web component will be rolling out later today. The app is available and working.
Edit: It's now working for me https://music.twitter.com
As an American who living in Canada though, you guys are screwed beyond belief. My girlfriend pays for internet BT THE SERVICE. I think the android plan allowed twitter/AIM/Facebook, and BlackBerry was email/bbm or something. That's the kind of thing Americans only imagine as a dystopian future: http://www.microsiervos.com/images/TieredInternet.jpg
Edit: I'd also like the point out the irony of hitting "Play Full Tracks", picking Rdio, then immediately being presented with a Facebook logo and login option but no Twitter SSO. /facepalm
They do have the website which works fine on mobile.
And as a side note I'm still getting this on Android:
http://i.imgur.com/Ox0BwML.png
Hopefully it's just a cache issue.
I've yet to see a beautiful web app on mobile not be a sluggish buggy mess. Twitter's mobile web app at first look decent but it's sooooo sllllllllooooowww and unresponsive on a quad core phone.
Forecast.io's mobile site is the first time I've seen any app or browser instance cause a phone to lock up and never recover. I'm suspecting that's a GPU driver bug.