FoxyTunes Planet & TwittyTunes

This is a long overdue post, but better late than never. I've had the FoxyTunes extension in my Firefox browser for something like a year and a half. It's also available for Internet Explorer. The one feature that got me to install it was a music player control in the browser (iTunes to start, a bunch more are supported now). FoxyTunes allows me to pause, skip, play, etc in the bottom pane of my browser. Unfortunately they don't yet support rhapsody and last.fm on OSX and they don't support the Hype Machine at all).

I always thought that FoxyTunes ought to do more with it's place in my music listening experience. Well they sure have. First, they rolled out a web service called FoxyTunes Planet which is like Wikipedia for music. The UI for FoxyTunes Planet seems very inspired by Netvibes, with its boxes that you can create and move around. Here's what FoxyTunes Planet looks like for the Arctic Monkeys:

I didn't do anything to customize that page. One it are 505 videos on YouTube, lyrics, photos from Flickr, similar artists from last.fm, Arctic Monkeys radio from Pandora, Arctic Monkeys results from The HypeMachine, Arctic Monkeys music from Rhapspdy, Amazon, and Google results. Wow. That's basically my universe of web music services. All neatly packaged on the fly by FoxyTunes. And available in one click from the player at the bottom of the browswer.

You can also tag anything in delicious, blog anything, share on Facebook, with one click in FoxyTunes Planet. The whole service has been optimized for social media.

But recently they launched one more thing that Ethan turned me on to this weekend. If you add the TwittyTunes extension to your browser, you can in one click send a message to Twitter telling everyone what you are listening to with a link back to that song's or artist's page in FoxyTunes Planet. Here's my Twitter profile and you can see that I've done that three times in the past twelve hours.

Here's the entire UI for the FoxyTunes extension, with the TwittyTunes button at the far right:

So FoxyTunes is now way more than a simple music player control in the bottom of my browser. They are a music discovery service with an quick and easy link to Twitter. Very cool.

One thing that's becoming very clear with all these great music 2.0 services is that they are starting to connect to each other and the rest of the web in some very interesting ways. It's now possible to stitch together your own "music 2.0" experience and FoxyTunes is a great way to do exactly that.

Comments

[Alex]

Thanks for a great review, Fred!

I couldn't have done a better job describing FoxyTunes myself :)

We indeed want to connect all things web and music, and are planning to do a lot more in this space.

-Alex
FoxyTunes

[Uri L.]

definitely impressive additions. Looks like the only thing missing now is a cool and useful widget/badge

[Ethan Bauley]

Ya, that thing is pretty hip.

It's pretty interesting to see this "cambrian explosion" going down in web services.

The depth of variety and *interlinking* almost makes software as deep and interesting as music itself. There are so many paths that you can take to finding about new things, everyone uses the software differently, creating and releasing it is highly democratic.

ALMOST.

(you won't see me go all the way, I have an post grad degree in music ;-)

For example, I got into Twitter VIA Foxytunes. Wouldn't have starting using it without that extension. And there's obviously a million things to do with Twitter.

If anyone cares what I'm up to:

Ethan's pre-natal record label's blog and web site
Ethan on Twitter

[Web Design]

Its interesting having all services optimized for social media.. Now need is to add more useful widgets in it to make it more demanding..