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Twones
UPDATE: Well that was quick. It doesn’t exist anymore as of last year. Oops.
So I’m just browsing through my Winamp playlist. Time to clean, and cleaning without music is pure torture. This is when Twhirl pops up with a tweat from Techcrunch:
Twones: A Social Music Feed (500 Beta Invites) http://tinyurl.com/5vnndg
Woot! Wait … what? What’s a Twones? Doesn’t really matter as I had already taken the bait.
Signed up with my normal MatthewHorton username and everything. Pretty typical process, so it was rather quick and painless. Immediately after registration, there’s a download page for the Twones Windows tracker and a Firefox tracker plugin. To be honest, the Windows installer should include both while keeping the Firefox tracker plugin seperate for other platforms (Mac OS X). The reason I say this is because on Windows you really need both for the full effect.
Twones’ Windows tracker not only installs an IE plugin but listens to iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player. Everything that you listen to, or watch, in Firefox is tracked with the Firefox plugin that is downloaded seperately. Considering this is in beta stages, this isn’t really a bad thing. Oh, and just to show how beta this project is, the Twones Tracker version is “beta 0.0.2”. The only “bug” I’ve run into so far is logging in with the Twones Tracker. It tells me I’ve logged in, but has no status indicator letting me know I really am signed in. Instead the menu option to log in is still there, and will keep letting me log in.
Now, when you log in you are presented with 4 areas for your music to show up: favourite tunes, last played tunes, most popular tunes last week, most popular tunes all time. All of them are exactly how they sound with the only exception being favourite tunes. For me this was somewhat misleading. When you think about something on a social site being a favorite, you assume there will be some icon or link. The only way I was about to make use of my favourites was by going to the “music activity” tab at the very top, then click on “add to library” for each song. There is no ranking system after this. Once added to your library, only the last 5 songs added will show up in chronological order. As I keep saying, Twones is still in early beta stages so I’m sure everything will come together soon enough.
On to the best part! Music activity is definately where the heart and soul of Twones is. Not only can you view multiple timelines, but there’s a little shoutbox/Twitter-like chat on the right side. Each entry on the timeline contains:
- Users profile pic (if any)
- “Artist - Title” of the song
- How long ago the song was played
- Links to either listen, watch or research the song through Skreemr, Youtube and Myspace
- “Respond” link - to reply to user about the song
- “Add to library” link - so your songs show up in your favorite
- “Recommend” link - this recommends the song to your friends.
Definately some good stuff going on here. It’s interesting to see just how much variety there is between the users. During the time that I’ve spent in music activity, not much has gone on in the chat, however. I’m pretty sure this will change fast. This isn’t a site I’ll probably stay focused on, but will keep an eye on. For now I will continue to use Last.fm.
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Aftermath
Just to give an insite to how I will probably do things, I will tweat with quick thoughts about movies and tv shows I watch. For now, I will call it: Aftermath.
What I will do is:
- Give the title of the movie
- Thoughts throughout the movie
- How I felt overall
- How many beers are required, if at all, for viewing.
- If I’ll blog about it
Now, if you all with excuse me. I still have some Steel Reserve and Chivas Regal to take care of.
