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.

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.

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.

I recently tweeted that I was closing my Google Buzz account. As I said at the time I was finding it a needless irritation in Gmail but my reasons were somewhat more complex than that.

I also left Bebo a while back, MySpace too is looking increasingly shaky and I recently closed my account on Dopplr. Although in this case it seems I might not be the only one. My reasons for leaving were simply that I don't travel the globe enough to justify it, but as the Guardian article says the fact that the site has been basically mothballed since it was bought by Nokia won't have helped keep my interest.

Obviously with the huge user bases of sites like Facebook, so the space has grown increasingly crowded. Being someone interested in the latest developments online I do seem to end up with profiles here there and everywhere while I try the site out and decide if it's somewhere I will keep going back to. Unfortunately there are some that just aren't going to make that cut.

Interestingly, since I left Google Buzz I've seen at least one tweet praising it as easier to dip into than Twitter. So the question is, do you think I was right to quit Google Buzz? Also which social sites have you ditched recently?