Social Radio Anyone?
Last Friday B&W discovered a great new site and it pretty much rendered the entire team–New York to Lima–useless for the afternoon. I’m talking about Turntable.fm, a new and actually fun way of listening/discovering music with a bunch of people, including your friends.
Created by Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, Turntable is still in a private alpha, so you can only log in if you have a Facebook friend already logged into the application.
It’s a fun mix of SHOUTcast + Chat + Sharing Tools. And the GUI, OH MY!! Adorable. You get to pick a cute avatar from a variety of options, but some of them are locked until you collect enough points to select them. To collect the coveted points, listeners have to like the song you are playing in any given ‘room’. If a lot of the listeners don’t like your song, it gets skipped. Great, democratic approach to music selection.
I really like the graphic details of the interface. The speakers bounce while the music is playing, the laptops showcase your computer’s OS, and the lighting in the graphics is pitch-perfect. They really nailed it. I just love it.
They use @font-face for the name of the song and artist, if the name of the song is too long, it scrolls like a marquee, and you know what? THAT’S THE BEST MARQUEE I’ve seen in a long, long time (and on a website that doesn’t suck.)
The one thing I will say is, it’d be really nice if there were more ways for users to win points. Users should be able to win some massive points for getting friends to join, or maybe just a couple points if they play good songs on the site for a few days in a row. Right now it seems like a very one-dimensional system, but hey! it is is a private alpha, so I get it.
I’m sure the project will evolve and become even more fun in the near future, but so far, SO GOOD!
