Spotify, the music streaming service from Sweden and based in London has launched what is known as ‘a platform’ for third-party applications.  

This basically means that other sites that do something else really well, such as Last.fm who are pretty good at keeping track at what you listen to and suggesting similar stuff you might like, can put now their cleverness into the Spotify application itself.  

It seems like a pretty good move to me, it's a quick way to add functionality that users might be looking for without seeing them disappearing to other services never to return. This is also similar to the approach taken by social-media behemoth Facebook, and stuff like Farmville doesn't seem to have done them any harm.  

It is also massively ambitious. Making Facebook into a platform offered a pretty blank canvas. Developers could pretty much go anywhere and do anything (so they brought us animated cows and bartering for grain - brilliant!) but I can't help but feel that the scope for the Spotify platform is much smaller. While it makes sense for the company to try and become *the* destination for online music, particularly with the constant challenge from Apple's iTunes, I wonder if their focus wouldn't have been better placed at improving the overall user experience and the findability (awful word I know) of music. 

Don't get me wrong, I want Spotify to be successful, I'm a subscriber and have been for a long time. Partnering with Facebook is a great move; it should help music lovers who aren't necessarily aware of the service to find it. The problem will be converting this huge potential for growth into actual hard cash to keep the music industry satisfied.

 

 

The new store in Reading opens on Saturday.

Twitter has announced a new search engine that not only will bring back relevant tweets but also pictures and video.

Key to this is the second part of the announcment which is the long rumoured integrated image and video hosting option. It will be available via all of Twitter's offical mobile apps. (including Tweetdeck?) I suspect this will mean all new or relatively light users will immediatley simply make the switch without thinking, and never go back to Twitpic or Yfrog images.

There are other users though for who the images they post are more significant than the service they use. This move could have implications for users who have built up significant collections of images on Flickr or Posterous. It's also going to be tough for new kids on the block like Instagram and Color who, despite carving niches of their own, could face an uphill battle to keep users in the face of a well-integrated Twitter image and video service.

This is another step in broadening the Twitter experience too. We know that advertisers are keen for more opportunities to get in front of the millions of global eyeballs looking at the site. Until now photo-sharing pages from the likes have Twitpic have been one way of doing it. Perhaps now we could see them buying space on Twitter's own photo pages?

Also look out for all the Apple references in the video above. What could they be about hmmm?

Everyone loves to tag their friends in a hilarious photo of them dancing drunkenly at a party on Facebook. Well now, you can tag pages too. 

So why would you would want to do this? Say for example you took a picture at a party and your friend in the picture was drinking a well known brand of beer. You could not only tag your friend so that they and all of their friends would see, but also the beer could be tagged so it would appear on the brand's Facebook page. 

This is clearly a great way for Facebook to encourage brands to sign up and engage with customers using the network. I imagine we will start to see brands trying to encourage us not only to "like" them but to tag them in photos too. 

The feature is currently restricted to the brands & products or people categories of pages but it is likely to be rolled out further soon. You can see the full annoucement here.

 

Ever since young tech savy music lovers got their first taste of fast reliable internet connections the game changed for the record companies and basically anyone hoping to make money out of music. 

Spotify was one way of changing that, giving users the chance to listen to as much as they liked, as often as they liked, so long as they paid the monthly subscription fee.

So far so good, except to get us interested there is a free option too which you could listen to as often and as much as the paid for one. The only limitations were that you couldn't have it on your phone and every so often an advertisment would interrupt the music. 

Well it seems this might have been a bit too generous. The company announced on their blog today that free users who joined before November 1st 2010 will, from May 1st, have their free listening cut from 20 hours of music a month to 10 hours, with a limit of five plays per track. The changes will also apply to accounts of those who signed up after November 1st 2010 six months from when they joined. 

On the face of it, it's a pretty drastic cut for users of the free service. Reaction has been pretty tough with many users commenting on the annoucement blog post that they would be leaving Spotify. 

In my opinion, this is pretty over the top. I'm a big fan of Spotify and I really think it offers a promising model for music delivery. Their mobile client is especially slick and well designed. They clearly need more users to make the switch to premium, the latest figures I could find suggest a converstion rate of 3.57 percent. The question for the team is will this change encourage people to pay up or put them off altogether? 

 

 

Two Sky Sports presenters have caused a stir following comments they made while they thought they were off-mic about female official at the Wolves v Liverpool match on Sunday. 

The coverage of the conversation has been all over the media today, even on Sky News. 

This story highlights something that everyone who ever comes into contact with the media should already understand. There is no such thing as "off the record." I was once told if you wouldn't want your grandmother to hear it, don't say it in front of a microphone. 

In some respects, that's the thing I find more shocking here. Not that men have a prejudice view of women in football, sadly that is frequently all too obvious although incidents like this show how unacceptable it is. The thing I find surprising was that two broadcasters who have plenty of experience between them didn't realise that what they were saying would be recorded and therefore would ineviatbly leak out. 

More worryingly, perhaps they didn't think it would matter? If that is the case then I expect they now realise the extent their naivety. There is no way a business like Sky can afford to be seen to support such out-dated and discriminatory views. 

I suggest that Sky Sports consider sending the two of them to meet with some of the very talented female footballers and officials, and for them to explain why their views were so wrong.  

  Apple is widely expected to launch it's iAd mobile advertising platform in the UK in December. They have apparently signed up a host of big name brands to kick start things too, including Unilever, Nespresso, Renault and Absolute Radio. The idea behind the platform is to allow developers to include ads within their apps. They are hosted by Apple who sell the space to the developers. So the first hitch is the high price tag that Apple is apparently demanding for the ads - reportedly around ten times the current average cost for similar campaigns. The other possible stumbling block for advertisers could be the perennial Apple problem of control. It is true to say the company likes to keep a very tight grip on their platforms and products, for example the approval process for the App Store. Indeed, on announcing their plans for iAd Apple said all of the advertisements would be polished and high quality. This seems to have led to a prolonged creative process which could stymie growth especially for smaller agencies or brands. Whatever the issues though, there is no doubt in my mind that the arrival of iAd in the UK will be huge for the mobile advertising business. It offers new opportunities the likes of which haven't really been seen before and one thing is certainly true, that it will only help Apple's profits to grow even further.  

I have been wanting to see this film since catching a trailer for it on the internet back in the Spring. For anyone who doesn't know it is the story of the creation of Facebook and the legal battles that ensued between the well known founder Mark Zuckerburg and another group of Harvard students who claimed the site was their idea. It starts well, and intellegently uses a time shift device to move through the narrative from the scenes of the legal action to the events themselves. The scenes are all tightly edited and there are plenty of quick cuts which keep the pace going nicely. For the non-geeks the good news is the boring coding in darkened dorm-rooms is kept to a minimum and it turns out that even the creation of one of the web's biggest hits can be turned into a love story if you try hard enough. There are good performances from Jessie Eisenberg as Zuckerburg, Andrew Garfield as best friend and financial backer Eduardo Saverin, and even Justin Timberlake puts in a good if slightly over the top performance as Napster founder Sean Parker (who comes off by far the worst from the movie in terms of image). The real stand out though has to be Armie Hammer who plays both of the Winklevoss twins brilliantly. There has been some criticism that the story isn't close enough to reality, or that it lacked some sort of moral undertones about the rights and wrongs of social networking but personally I didn't go to the cinema to see a documentary so it was an entertaining well made film with an excellent soundtrack.

 

So Andrew Marr has vented his spleen against bloggers of all people. Apparently at the Cheltenham Literary Festival the former BBC Political Editor said that most bloggers are: "bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting."

As you might expect the internet is now aflame with a backlash of posts hitting back at the comments which are obviously fairly ill thought through and out of touch.

Even his own employer dear old Auntie has for some time seen the advantage of encouraging their most expert commentators, including Marr's successor Nick Robinson, to write blogs giving insightful comment to supplement their broadcasting.

The thing that I'm really wondering though, is why Marr is so irked by the online comentators? Is it because unlike him they are not constrained to a Sunday morning television programme to break political stories and therefore are in a position to run stories on any day of the week, there by scooping the traditional end of the week exclusives.

 

If you read this blog regularly, you probably think I only ever go and see children's films at the cinema. And, well you would be right.

This is because they are the only ones that the wife and I can agree on. We used to enjoy seeing scary horror films, but then we moved in together and suddenly they lost their appeal. ;0)

So usually one of us suggests we go to the cinema and then selects their choice of film, the other doesn't agree and we reach a compromise of the latest animation!

Anyway this is a round about way of saying that we went to see Toy Story 3 this weekend and I have to be honest I quite enjoyed it.

Most of the usual Disney Pixar style is there with plenty of wry jokes as well as a moral tale about coming of age and sticking with your friends even when the chips are down.

I did find some of the preachy moralising rather uncomfortable though, and I think that if I had children I wouldn't be so happy with some of the questions the film could raise.

The techniques were faultless though, and the animation was as impressive as ever, although it has become even more apparent to me that 3D is simply a device to persuade cinema goers to part with even more of their cash for no actual benefit as the feature wasn't really essential to the experience whatsoever.