Why turntable.fm is One of the Best Music Webapps Around
I have recently stumbled upon a fairly new webapp called turntable.fm. What I found was a very simple yet promising concept and an innovative social music player that may become a reference. So what is it all about?
In turntable.fm you log in with your Facebook account (in fact, you can also use it in Facebook's site as a Facebook app). However, the link with that social network ends there: when logged in, you get to choose your nickname and your avatar. After that you can choose which room you want to enter to start listening to music. Each room has its own theme or music genre, and everyone can create one. In every room there is a turntable with five slots where people can go to play music. So if you use one of the five slots available and get to play, everybody in that room listens to what you're playing, and then you listen sequentially to the chosen songs of the other users at the turntable until it gets back to you. You can label any song awesome or lame and you can talk with other users in the same room through a chat room (remember them?). Labeling a song as awesome gives a DJ point to the user playing it (used to get new avatars), and many people labeling it lame makes it finish early to start the next one.
This concept is so simple yet so brilliant that one may wonder why no one thought of it before. We've all been sharing our favorite songs in Facebook and IMs, probably with Youtube links, but no one has ever pushed the social music concept further. Now, you have a non-stop music playlist made of the songs you and your friends (and random strangers in the same theme room) are sharing. It becomes even easier to show your favorite songs to large groups and to get to know new awesome music.
Social interaction is another great feature. You interact not only with music, but also chatting in chat rooms like in the 90's. Great conversations usually come around the music in the room, even with complete strangers.
I also love webapps such as Grooveshark and the like. However, turntable.fm goes a step further and adds social interaction to music playing. It probably has a lot to improve, and there will probably be better alternatives in the future, but in the meantime this is what we have. And it's not bad at all.
Follow Technorati