The Danosphere.

Streaming is quickly becoming the new way people consume music. Whether you want to listen to a specific song or discover music on-the-go music streaming services are the new go-to option for finding and listening to music. When it comes to streaming services there are many players, but 3 major names dominate the market: Grooveshark, Pandora, and Spotify.

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about which service is best, and what features each service offers, so I’m here to set the record straight. All information in this post applies to U.S. users only- beacuse I am in the U.S. I cannot accurately provide information on how these services do or don’t work in other countries. Another important note is that Spotify is not yet available in the U.S. (unless you use some trickery) but it is expected to launch in the U.S. within the next 3-6 momths.

Here is an infographic I put together outlining what each of these services have to offer. What prompted this was a post I read on  Gizmodo (one of my favorite tech/gadget blogs) “Why It’s Worth Getting Excited For Spotify’s US Launch”. In the post they ooh and ahh over Spotify as if it’s some kind of game changer- when in reality, there are already better services offering more features for less money that are already live and operational in the U.S.

Let’s see how these 3 streaming titans stack up:

I have used all 3 services first hand. Here are some of my personal thoughts on each service:

Spotify – Generally over hyped. No web client, extremely annoying audio ads for free users. I am in the U.S. so I was only able to use the desktop client, thus I cannot comment on the mobile client. Was unable to listen to several recently released songs because the service didn’t have them available yet and there is no “upload your own” option. Subscription is very expensive relative to other services.

Pandora – Awesome discovery feature which uses the music genome project. Annoying audio ads. No way to play songs on-demand. Web client is fair, it gets the job done, but also looks somewhat outdated like it was made in 2000. The service has at its heart custom “radio stations” that you create yourself. In a nutshell you choose a collection of music, either by artist(s), song(s) or genre(s). You can add as many as you like to a radio station and you can have as many radio stations as you like. Pandora will then use the music genome project to give you an endless playlist based on your selections, the results are pretty awesome and it’s a great way to effortlessly find new music. You can also like/dislike music as it plays to further refine your stations. Limitations for free users are pretty lame though (40hrs a month and limited skips).

Grooveshark – The service I actually decided to pay for when they finally released their iPhone app. Web, desktop and mobile clients (for paying users- free users get only the web client). All their clients are extremely current and robust, giving you the option to build playlists, like/dislike music, favorite music, and share music on any platform. All their clients are extremely consistent as well, and support all the same feature sets with very similar UIs so there is no need to relearn the product on different platforms. From what I gather most the music on Grooveshark is user-uploaded. This means that there can be duplicates and songs of questionable quality at times, but for the most part the music is very high quality. Their discovery service (aka Grooveshark Radio) is pretty cool too. Unlike Pandora it uses songs already in your playlist, and the data it has based on your like/dislike history to find new music for you. Paying users also get access to new features before the general public (think of it as google labs). Some of their latest new features are radio-by-tag and last.fm scrobbling.

So there you have it. Hopefully this puts to rest some of the misinformation swirling around these streaming services and provides you with a clear picture of what each service offer sso that, if you so choose, you can pay for the service that gives you the most bang for your buck. I chose Grooveshark and haven’t looked back. Happy streaming!

Oprah is now on twitter. Oh, my, gurd.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!

One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps,  no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil

Facebook, the monolith social network currently in charge of the social networking scene, needs to make money… like… really needs to make money. With an impressive 200million users you’d think the site would be churning out profit hand over fist, but it’s not. In an attempt to monetize and keep up with the explosive growth of Twitter, Facebook redesigned last month to look more like twitter, or did it? 

When you look closely at the redesign, the real emphasis is more about ‘pages’ and less about ‘trying to be like twitter’. But Facebook doesn’t want to shock it’s userbase with this new emphasis, it wants a slow dip in the pool, as opposed to a splash. 

And so it begins. If you haven’t noticed yet, your “highlights” column is probably about 50% page-based activities… your friends liking brands, ‘fanning’ brands, commenting etc. Facebook’s next move was relocating ‘People You May Know’ above the fold… previously it was underneath the ‘highlights’ column, generally below the fold. While the location change didn’t seem to be a big deal, the next move certainly is- “People You May Know’ is now ‘Suggestions’. These newfound ‘Suggesstions’ extend beyond freinds… to brands. Finally the Facebook vision is coming full circle, as it actively ‘pushes’ brands at you based on the activities of your friends. It pulls this off in a cunning way, by mixing in the brands with your friends.

Here is a great example of this, Facebook’s ‘Suggestions’ for me (and a bunch of people I don’t know):

Don’t get me wrong I love the office, but for me Facebook is about connecting with friends NOT about beomcing a poster child for a brand just because i may use/like them. I like “The Office” I watch it every week, but I am not a Facebook Fan of the Office. 

As Facebook pushes forward with it’s plans to monetize the question becomes “at what cost?”. Is Facebook alienating users by putting so much emphasis on brands and activities centered around brands? What do you think?

This week Digg released their “Diggbar” which also seconds as a URL shortening service. What this means for the end user… or more importantly the content generating users whose content is submitted to digg by other people is that- now Digg is stealing your traffic!

Mashable was quick to give Digg the ole’ reach-around, making it sound so soft and cuddly! But the truth is that Digg is milking traffic from other sites, without their permission at all. How much traffic are they stealing? Enough to boost their 20million unique visitors by about 20%. On top of all that (as if that isn’t enough) they also inject ads into the diggbar frame, so they are stealing views AND revenue from the sites that are shared via their shortened URL.

I could go on for ages about how much that sucks for the sites losing traffic and ad revenue to digg, or about how crappy shortened URLs are for the web, or about how the diggbar is killing SEO for sites framed by it, but luckily someone has already done that for me.

Want the truth? Here is it:

The Truth about Digg’s DiggBar