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? 

 

 

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?

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.

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.