Shazam Plays Nice with Twitter and, For Some Reason, Google Maps
By Simon Sage on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 1:19 PM PST In Applications, LBS, Mobile Music, Social Networking, iPhone
Shazam for the iPhone, most prominently known for its music identification service, just underwent a nice upgrade thanks to OS 3.0 that includes three new features. First up, and arguably the most useful, Shazam now lets you send your tunes to Twitter so you can share recently-discovered music to all your loyal followers. Blip.fm has a pretty strong foothold in this kind of thing, so we’ll see how Shazam manages to compete. Second, Shazam has added what they call postcards, which are basically collections of songs that you’ve found that you think a particular friend would enjoy. Lastly, and most strangely, is new geolocoation support, so you can see where you were when you tagged a particular song. This feature just confuses me. Don’t get me wrong, I love location-based services and am all for getting people to use GPS for something other than driving directions, but I really couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which you would need to recall and make that connection between music and place. Neither “where was I when I heard that song?” or “what was playing when I was there?” seem like questions people ask on a regular basis. Maybe I’m crazy – is there some kind of geolocation/music cross-section that I’m missing, here? You can grab the new version of Shazam for free from the iTunes App Store.
[via Shazam]
I think they went too far with copying tunewiki. I can get why they would copy the tweet functionality from them, but maps? tunewiki maps makes sense (where this artist/song is being listened to? what people around me are listening to?) – but a map for “where was I when I heard a song that I didn’t know?”… seems half cooked to me. A really cool usage of google map is http://www.tunewiki.com/musicMaps.aspx
I think that my issue with Shazam is that they only know which songs a user did not know and not what he/she listening to. This is why I like the tunewiki maps and charts better. My killer app would be to merry this two apps together, tunewiki player, charts and maps with Shazam tagging capabilities.
BTW – Is it true that this version of Shazam is not out for Android yet??
Shak