Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers to this question must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web. At first glance this seems like Twitter is about letters, characters, numbers and nothing more. But “Stand Back” if you think that limitation would stop the human imagination. The list of Twitter applications is almost mind-boggling and music is right up there. Music Player has discussed Twitter music applications in passing, but lets dig in and really see what musical Twittering is all about.
Song.ly is one of the most popular and easiest to use musical applications for Twitter. The key thing about Song.ly is that the track itself must be hosted online – Song.ly does not offer the option to download the audio file to your computer. If you know the link for a song then you can type it in, or you can put in the name of a song and Song.ly will do the search for you. In the case
of my search for “My Hometown” the results included My Hometown by Ross Martin; My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen; Trips around my Hometown by Arthur Kamst and a long list of additional choices. All I did was click the Tweet button next to Bruce’s song and all my followers got a Tweet from me with short link to a page allowing them to play the song right in the browser without having to download it first!
Tra.kz offers just a subset of what Song.ly does – but is still quite a handy tool. If you already know the URL for your song you could just enter it into Twitter but most URLs are like long like http://www.mp3raid.com/search/download-mp3/1/billy_joel.html and you can use Tra.kz to create the much more typeable http://tra.kz/cbb.
A side note to these crazy websites, is a common question that I get about these domain names: “where is the dot com?” Most folks don’t realize that every country has what is called a country-code top-level domain name . So, when you visit Song.ly you are technically visiting a web site registered in the country of Libya. Somebody was wise enough to realize that many English words end in “ly” and there was money to be made. Likewise, when you visit Tra.kz, the site is actually registered in Kazakhstan. My guess is most of our readers can quote lyrics – but are like me and had to Google Kazakhstan to even figure out what continent it was on.
Anyway, lets move from the music of Kazakhstan to the fabulous notes of the Federated States of Micronesia with ListenTo.fm, a service which allows you to share both music and video files on Twitter. All you have to do is cut and paste a MP3 link or a YouTube link along with as well as supplying the name of the artists and the title of the song. ListenTo.fm creates a custom page and a custom URL that you can Twitter to your followers.
A big selling point for Song.ly, Tra.kz and ListenTo.fm is the emphasis is on providing tools that are easy to use. You don’t have to sign up in order to start using these tools and there are no downloads of any kind – these solutions are all web browser-based.
Now if you can deal with a bit more complexity you can impress, if not amaze, your Twitter buddies with YiqYaq.com which allow you to take up to 16 Twitter messages and have them converted from text-to-speech so people can literally hear your tweets. At it’s core, Yiqyaq is a personalized, community-based online radio network. Unlike the other applications in the blog, this is one application where I think you will actually need to watch and listen to the introductory video they have on their home page. However, when you master YiqYaq you can essentially create radio channels of your own content you created if you have a microphone on your PC, content from other YiqYaq users or content from places on the web. The Twitter integration lets you create tweets that include links to these stations and the coolest feature of all, the one I alluded to earlier, is having you pick which computer voice you like and having your tweets available as speech. The computer voice won’t sing yet – but you can do DJ intros to the tunes you have attached to your tweets.
Even as I type this article, I suspect there is somebody hard at work on the next great idea that will put even more music into the Twitter world! Hey, look out right below and you can tweet this article to your followers – go for it!
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