Collaborative Playlists

Making mixes is fun, but we find making them with your friends is even better. We’ve added new functionality to our playlists on myMusic for Facebook that allow you to invite your friends to edit and create playlists with you. There’s also a new create playlist tool so now it’s even easier to make the perfect mix for a lazy sunday or your next party.

Concerts are here

A commonly requested feature for our application is concerts. People want to know when an artist is touring and when a show is in their neighborhood. We took a big step in delivering this to them today with our first release of concerts. To see what we’ve done, visit any Artist page (such as the Plain White T’s) of an artist on tour and we’ll display where their next 3 shows are. You can click to “see all” to see all of their shows, and clicking “Find Tickets” will take you to a page to purchase the tickets.

This is only on Facebook now and is just the first step in our concert integration. Let us know what you think.

New and Improved Library View

Yesterday, along with our big PR release, we officially released the new My Library view. Not only did we give the library a complete user-friendly makeover (with the iTunes look-and-feel), but we also added some great functionality for our users to better view, filter, play and share their music.

Here are some of the more glamorous changes:

• Your library is now sortable by track name, artist, play count, and time of last played.
• Users can “search” their own library for easy filtering.
• Unwanted songs can be easily deleted from your library.
• Playlists can be quickly created with the “check box” and “Add to Playlist” action.
• And my personal favorite - users now have the ability to add songs from a friends’ library by simply clicking the “Add to Library” button next to any track.

So what are you waiting for? Check it out and let us know what you think.

See What People are Listening to with myMusic’s Charts

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see the best songs from all of your friends? Now you can! The myMusic application just added charts. You can now see the top tracks and top artists of your friends, your networks and everyone on Facebook.

On the myMusic home page, there is a short chart that shows the top 3 tracks and artists of your friends and everybody. Click the “See All” from there or click “My Charts” on the top of the page to see the full charts. From the list of songs, you can easily pop out the playlist into the Popout player and sit back and hear all the tracks that your friends love. Check it out by clicking here

Showing the tracks from your network is also a great way to see what people around you are actually listening to. If you’re in school, you can now see the top tracks of your entire campus. If you working in NYC, you can easily see the top track last week in all of New York. And, of course, each time you find a track you can play it right there, send it to a friend, or post a comment

Read the Feed

Today we launched a new version of our Facebook My Music app homepage, that includes a news feed of what your friends are up to musically.

In one glance now, you can see what’s going on among your friends musically, not just on Facebook, but in iTunes, on their iPod (and soon from other sources as well). Here are the different news feed “stories” that we include now:

• When you receive a musical poke
• When a friend send a musical poke
• When a friend receives a musical poke
• When a friend installs the application
• When a friend writes on an aritst wall
• When a friend’s top artist of the week changes
• When a friend’s top song of the week changes
• A friend’s first play of the day
• When a friend creates a playlist
• When a friend creates a power hour playlist

And we have a lot more story types in the works, too:

• Top 5 tracks and artists of the week of all friends
• Top 5 tracks, artists of the week of network
• When a friend writes on album wall
• When a friend writes on track wall
• Top track, artist of lists of friends (as soon as FB releases it)
• When a friend changes their musical status
• When a friend tags a track
• When a friend bookmarks a playlist
• One of your playlists gets bookmarked

Eventually too we’d like to have users be able to customize which stories they have in their feed, and even create specific story types (I’d like to have news on “Kayne West”).

Lastly, we can put this feed anywhere: can expose it as a RSS feed that a user can consume wherever. Would you be interested in that? Is there any other suggestions you might have?

Hope you enjoy it!

MyMusic Now Has Playlists

Listening to individual songs is great. But what’s even better is listening to a list of songs. We’ve always synched your iTunes playlists with the website, but now you can do even more. You can create new playlists, edit playlists that have been synched, add pictures, change names, and more.

It’s a great way to share songs too. Just make a playlist, give it a name and share it on your profile.

Check out the new feature by clicking HERE

More Facebook Functionality: Popout Player

As you may have realized, our facebook application is a great way to see what your friends are playing. Whether you check out the “My Friends Music” tab at the top of the application, or see the latest plays a friend is doing on his/her profile - the My Music application is working really well.

We haven’t stopped working on it though. Over the past week, we’ve been updating the application. You can now more easily listen to many tracks in a row by using our popout player where you queue up tracks to listen to.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Find Others in Qloud

We did a small update today to the site to allow you to more easily find other users in Qloud. You can now find users on qloud that are the same age, live in the same area, or listen to the same music as you. To do this, all you need to do is click the “Find Others” button at the bottom left of the Qloud page (or click here)

Also with this feature, you can open up collective libraries of users. For example, i could open up a library of all women ages 20-30 who live in New York. I can then sort it to see what the most popular songs are for them in the past month. It’s quite interesting to see what people listen to in different areas. Check it out for yourself…

Doing More with Tags

Last week we did another release of our iTunes for Windows plug-in.

This release responded to lots of user feedback that people wanted to do more with tags. So we made the following cool stuff possible:

• Users can rename a tag in a single batch process that changes it on every track that it is on.
• Users can delete a tag in a similar single batch way
• Users can filter their tracks library with tags in a new way. To date when you clicked on one more more tags, the tracks that have ALL the selected tags (’AND’ logic for Boolean junkies) were displayed. In other words, you could see all of the songs that are tagged both “bossa nova” and “dance.” Now there is a radio control at the top of the tag window that allows you to switch between matching ALL tags and matching ANY tags (’OR’ for the junkies). So you could filter down to the tracks that have either been tagged “bossa nova” or have been tagged “dance.”
• User can export their tags into an XML file. Your tags are yours, and we don’t intend to keep them captive. So this feature lets you get up and take your tags with you if you choose. It also is the beginning of lots more cool stuff that we’re going to do . . .

In addition to these tag features, we spent a lot of time trying to make the plug-in easier and more enjoyable to use. We’ve made make transitions smoother. We’ve given you clearer indications of what is happening when the plug-in is performing certain functions. And we’ve cleaned out some visual garbage that was floating around.

Thank you for the feedback that guided these changes, and we are always looking for more.

Widgets, More Ways to Search, and Fixes - An Update

We’ve just pushed out our latest release which has some really cool stuff in it. Thanks to all of you for your feedback. Some of the new items:

We now have blog and MySpace widgets. If you want to put your list of tracks or your friends’ tracks on your MySpace page or your blog, you now can with Qloud. Any track search you do, whether for top tracks played in Brazil or your girlfriend’s top tracks tagged “stupid,” can now be made into a flash widget. If you’re looking for a music widget, these are the best available. (note: you must be logged in to do this). Or, if you don’t want a list of tracks, we’ve added our first badge which you can get on our download page. This is just an image you can put on your blog to promote Qloud.

There are now more & better ways to search on Qloud:

• Want to find what people are listening to in your city? You used to have to enter a zip code in the refine results area to find this info, we’ve now added a city dropdown list to make it easy. We did the top 50 metro areas in the US. If you don’t find your city there, you can still search by zip code. You can also still search by country as before.
• Want to find music released in the 80’s? Or music just from 2006, there’s now an area where you can search by tracks release dates. For instance, you can find tracks released after 1886 and before 1988 if you want to find the final years of hair rock.
• We also have added label search. This is just our first iteration of this, but you can now search for tracks by any label - either a major label or independent. For example, if you want to search for the top played tracks on Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label that have been release in 2006, you can! Here’s the page with those search results.

We also have done many little fixes such adding wikipedia information on artist pages, making user’s homepages linkable, playing 30 second clips in WMA on Mac’s instead of Real, adding a link to your user page from the first search page, and many many more…

As always, please keep sending us feedback. We welcome and appreciate any commetns you might have. In fact, several of the items in this update came striaght from you. So, keep ‘em coming!

Enjoy and have a good weekend -