Have you ever been walking down the street and suddenly a song comes on that resonates with you? Suddenly you’re dancing in the middle of the street or on the subway and all you want to do is tell your friends about the song that you’re listening to right then. Thanks to Social Player, a new iPhone application, you’ll be able to keep your friends up to date with all the music you’re listening to. While you could theoretically publish every song you’re listening to, it makes much more sense to only share your favorites.
Social Player does one simple thing: let’s you share with your friends on Facebook any song you’re listening to. Currently featured on the homepage of the iTunes app store, Social Player does nothing more than keep your friends up to date about your latest listening habits. While I would have expected Apple to integrate similar functionality directly into their iPod application, Social Player is a layer directly on top of the existing iPod application.
That means Social Player will function in the background, letting you open it up anytime you want to share the song you’re currently listening to with your Facebook friends. The idea is so simple that I think it could become a pretty big application. Developed by Andreas Doll and Sven Geisler, Social Player is the first application to launch out of the duo’s new startup project.me. If you like sharing your music listening habits with friends, the Social Player is the best application I’ve seen to do so.
While I’m not sure how the developers intend to expand this application, it appears that the company is collecting data about each song a user listens to. Perhaps the company is looking to develop a new version of last.fm, one of the largest social music products on the internet. Whatever their keeping the information for, providing users with the ability to share their music on Facebook is a simple yet useful feature. You can download the application in the app store right now for $0.99.
One downside of the application is that when you publish a story to your Facebook Page, the story doesn’t link to the actual song. The result is that your friends are notified of the song title, artist, and album, as well as the album cover. With a few added upgrades, I think this application could really take off.
This doesn’t add much value. Shazaam and Pandora already do this in their own way.
I bought Social Player a week or so ago. I agree with you Nick, it’s dead simple, takes a second and then your friends are off commenting on what you are listening too.
Great app!
Hello Mr. O’Neill,
I am the lead developer of Social Player. By reading your detailed review I see that you took your time and therefore apprehended many of our motivations and intentions accurately. Thanks for that.
I would like to clarify some details:
We are not collecting any user data. The data is uploaded to Facebook and only visible to a user’s friends. We only get statistics from Facebook that show us the overall usage, and it’s gone through the roof since Apple was so kind to feature us. Many thanks to our new customers from all over the world: Thank you, gracias, arigatou gozaimasu, danke schön, merci beaucoup!
Actually we do link to the song. We don’t upload or stream the user’s music files to his friends, that might be dubious from a legal point of view. But if a shared song is available in iTunes, Social Player will try to link to it so that one can listen to a preview of the shared song. Just tap on the album cover and you are there, it works with both a browser and Facebook’s iPhone app.
With the next version we will add email sharing so that you can share with friends without Facebook access. And we will add the possibility to control music playback with gestures. Where do we go from here? We have a lot of cool ideas for the future. And we get a lot of requests for the addition of access to other popular social networks. Whatever we will do, we will try to keep it clean, simple and social.
Keep in touch with Social Player by reading our blog (http://www.projectme.eu/blog) or by getting a fan of the Social Player app on Facebook (http://bit.ly/SocialPlayerFacebook)
Greetings from Berlin
The project.me team
Look forward to trying this. Henry - you don’t have to “add email”. In FB share functionality, user can simply enter in an email address.
@ John Coltrone
Yeah, that’s a good tip. But what we would like to have is the possibility to send a song to anybody per email. Not so effective as publishing on Facebook, but reportedly there are still people without a Facebook account. :o)
Regards
Henry
Don’t understand how my friends can link up on facebook from a pc, and hear the music I am playing on my iphone. Please explain. Thanx