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.

So earlier this week twitter made a big announcement. The most interesting thing is that media such as videos and images will now appear in the stream rather like Facebook.

This is important because it means no longer will you have to go off of the current page to see what tweets are talking about. It means that sponsored tweets could include the YouTube video in support of the campaign will show up there in the feed. Clever social media chap Paul Armstrong has a good post for PR Week on the significance of this.

The design is clearly based on new Twitter iPad client and from the shots I've seen looks very slick and smooth.

It just shows how quickly things are moving for the social media site, which I joined in December 2006. In those days no one had an iPhone and mobile internet was very much a fledgling technology which meant the only way to interact with the site on the move was by using SMS. Now it is possible not only to tweet directly using any number of client apps but also take photos and even upload videos directly from your phone. Basically people, the future is here.