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.

 

 

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? 

 

 

  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.  

Earlier this year I moved my main website over to flavors.me which is a great new way of creating a personal site that acts of a kind of hub to connect all that social stuff we all accumulate online these days. What appealed to me about the site was the simple way that it could be configured to give a custom look while at the same time successfully pulling in data from a number of other locations. My site isn't the most exiting I have ever seen, indeed it is nothing compared to some of the fantastic examples you can see in the new directory but in some ways that suits me because I want to keep it simple. As well as making use of flavors.me I've also made a few other changes to my web presence, of which this site is part. I now run my main blog here on wordpress. This allows me to do longer form posts, sometimes with pictures, and have a nice looking theme. Meanwhile I will now use my Posterous site as a more of a photo blog and place for useful graphics or videos which I come across. This is mainly because of the ease that media can be sent into it, and the way it automatically shares posts elsewhere. Finally I have revamped my tumblr. I've had one ever since Pownce closed but was never really sure what to do with it. I must admit I like the way it works and I did toy with the idea of making it the home of my blog but there is still something stopping me that I can't quite put my finger on. So for the time being I'm using it as a lifestream, pulling in blog posts, tweets, rss links and photos. For now this is a setup which I'm relatively happy with but just like the rest of the internet, things are always changing, so we'll see how it goes.

Friday was a big day for Apple fans in the UK. Almost 2 months after the iPad was launched in the USA it finally became available here too. Many people were so keen to get their hands on the latest device from Cupertino that they queued outside Apple Stores around the country from very early in the morning. I haven't got an iPad of my own yet, partly because my wife has yet to agree that I actually need one but also because I'm still not sure that the price is quite right. Having read what others have said about their experiences so far though, I'm sure that it's only a matter of time before I decide to shell out. In my opinion, the design and concept of the iPad will be game changing for technology. Sure it has its downsides and the first edition of any new device is never perfect but the way it allows the user to interact directly without needing a hardware mouse or keyboard is the kind of idea which made Star Trek: TNG seem so futuristic in the 90s.

So Steve, Phil and Scott have done their thing. Multitasking, folders, a unified inbox with capability for more than one exchange account are all features that will finally persuade me to upgrade to a 3GS in the summer. The real news though is about iAd which will enable the creation of in app advertising with some of the revenue being past on to developers. This is potentially crucial for the future of mobile advertising. I can see that there will be some debate how popular it will be, some users might dislike the intrusiveness of the in-app ads but this should drive the good developers to look at making the transition from content to ad as seamless as possible. This announcement comes only a few days after Apple's game changing launch of the iPad which I know some people might be sceptical about the new device, personally I think that it is far too soon to judge the potential and innovation of the iPad and in time it will be talked about as a pivotal moment in computing development.

Thanks to Adam Vincenzini I managed to use an invite code to mflow this week.

The service is the latest web creation to get the twitterati excited and I can see what all the fuss is about. The simple idea is to combine the social interaction of Twitter and Facebook with the music library of iTunes or Spotify. Now users of LastFM might say they've been doing something similar for ages and I am a big fan of that site too. Mflow does seem to do something different though, mainly I think because of the focus around following people. Last FM is all about building your own listening library but mflow seems to encourage more sharing of popular tunes.

There is another factor to the mflow experience which I haven't really explored yet and this is the idea that if someone buys a track that you recommended, then you get rewarded. As I've only been registered with the service since Friday and it is still in invite only beta it might take a while for this to really gain momentum.

Overall though, I'm really impressed with mflow so far, the design of the app is pretty slick and they've really embraced social media with a nice posterous blog, as well as presences on twitter, facebook and flickr. There a few features I would like to see, such as the ability to tweet what I'm listening to and for my tunes to be scrobbled to Last FM but it is early days and I'm sure these will come in due course. So I would definitely recommend giving mflow a go if you get the chance. I currently have five invites so if you would like to try it then drop me a message.

Thanks to Adam Vincenzini I managed to use an invite code to mflow this week.

The service is the latest web creation to get the twitterati excited and I can see what all the fuss is about. The simple idea is to combine the social interaction of Twitter and Facebook with the music library of iTunes or Spotify. Now users of LastFM might say they've been doing something similar for ages and I am a big fan of that site too. Mflow does seem to do something different though, mainly I think because of the focus around following people. Last FM is all about building your own listening library but mflow seems to encourage more sharing of popular tunes.

There is another factor to the mflow experience which I haven't really explored yet and this is the idea that if someone buys a track that you recommended, then you get rewarded. As I've only been registered with the service since Friday and it is still in invite only beta it might take a while for this to really gain momentum.

Overall though, I'm really impressed with mflow so far, the design of the app is pretty slick and they've really embraced social media with a nice posterous blog, as well as presences on twitter, facebook and flickr. There a few features I would like to see, such as the ability to tweet what I'm listening to and for my tunes to be scrobbled to Last FM but it is early days and I'm sure these will come in due course. So I would definitely recommend giving mflow a go if you get the chance. I currently have five invites so if you would like to try it then drop me a message.

There have been loads of posts about the importance of Google Wave.

The new toy from the clever chaps in Mountain View has been helped by the scarcity of invites which means that plenty of people who are keen to peak in and see what all the fuss is about can't.   

I managed to get an invite a few weeks ago, (thanks Steve!) and I've been messing about there ever since. So first impression? It's a bit quiet. The fact that very few people I know are actually on makes usefulness limited. Combined with this is the fact there is no easy way that I've found to check if someone is actually on.

The idea though, is quite innovative. You can have a conversation with as many or as few people as you like using many different applications and devices at the same time. I can see the benefits, but it will take some time for them to become really useful.

Incidentally, I have a few invites. Drop me a line if you're interested and if you're already on then by all means connect to me its my first name dot my second name at googlewave dot com.

I use twitter quite a lot. In fact some people might say I'm addicted. Anyway here's a word cloud from my tweets over the past year. Pleased to see the wife gets in!
www.twitter.com/philspray