It’s somewhat embarrassing for me that my wife actually had a twitter account before I did. Of course, I’ve now tweeted roughly 8 jillion times more than her, so I win. It did take me a while to figure out how to make Twitter work for me- but when I did, I was hooked and never looked back, even writing an article on Etsy’s blog on how sellers might use Twitter. (It’s about who you follow)
The pattern was exactly the same for Tumblr (but my wife is still sans tumblog!). I could tell there was value, but had to push for a while to figure out what that value was for me. (It’s about who you follow).
That’s why I’m loving bnter (although it should be spelled bantr). I saw the team demo it at a North Brooklyn Breakfast meetup and immediately knew I wanted to archive funny conversations with my kids (something I used to do on twitter a lot), although the service was meant for texts at the time. Once I got on and started sharing conversations I was immediately hooked- I never had to work to figure it out the best way to use it for me. Of course, they saw it my way ;-) and have encouraged any conversations- not just texts.
Of course, funny is good, so it has that going for it; the user base is definitely aiming to entertain you. The team is doing a great job at engaging users and building the community- kudos to them for that. What happens as it goes forward? no idea- but I’m excited to see.
We are very excited to announce a major new release today. We’ve been working on this for the past 3 months and it is our biggest release to date. We’ve added a bunch of awesome social features to help you share all the amazing music you’ve been discovering with all your friends.
Here’s what new:
Noting songs Since the beginning you have been asking for a way to ‘favorite’ or 'love' the tracks you find that are special. We’ve listened and we’ve done it in a way we know you’re going to love. Starting today, you can Note the songs you love. You’ll see gray musical notes next to songs throughout the extension: If you love a song and want to remember it, click the note icon to note it. The note icon will turn blue indicating it’s been noted.
Then what? Two things happen with every song you note: 1. It gets added to a new tab in the extension called Noted. This tab lists all of the songs you note, with the most recent song at the top. This is now a playlist; you can play or queue all of the songs in your noted tab.
2. If you have an exfm account, it is added to your shiny new public profile page, located at ex.fm/YourName.
Yep, that’s right- If you create an exfm account you now have a public web page with all of your noted songs. In addition, you can upload a profile pic, add your real name, bio, location and website. You can also follow and be followed by others.
Anyone can visit your page (in any browser) and listen to your noted tracks. If they have the Chrome extension installed, every track on the page will be added to their library.
Following Exfm profiles give you the opportunity to follow and be followed by other exfm users. When you follow someone, they will be added to your 'Noted’ tab for easy access to the songs they’ve noted. Every song noted by people you follow will be added to your library and every song you note will be added to people’s library who follow you. You’ll also see the profile pic of people you follow right inside your library so you can always be sure of where a song came from.
Sharing In addition to noting, you can now post songs directly to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s the simplest way to share the songs you love with your existing friends and followers. When you visit these sites, all songs posted by the people you follow will be playable right there on the page. They will also be added directly to your library and appear in you new Music Activity Feed.
When you share a song, an ex.fm/SONG link will be sent out, directing users to the song page, where they can listen to the song, note it, and share it themselves. For people with the extension installed, the link will be playable right there on the page.
Let’s repeat that: If your friends have the extension installed; Facebook and Twitter feeds become music feeds- every ex.fm link posted will be a playable song. Check it out on Twitter:
Song Pages All songs now have their own public page — with a really short url — where anyone on any browser can listen to, note, and comment. These pages are perfect for sharing.
Recent Activity Feed We’ve redesigned the 'Home’ tab inside the extension to be a constantly updating activity feed of new music. New songs noted by people you follow on exfm will appear here, as well as songs shared by people you follow on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. You now have a central hub to play all the great music your friends have posted - wherever that may be.
Other Changes: -The inline play button is now smaller and allows you to play, queue, note, share and buy every track that the extension identifies. -You can turn off autoupdating for new sites in your library. Go to the settings page in the extension to disable autoupdating for every site. -We’ve also made various optimizations to improve performance
Your Feedback: Most of the product improvments to date have come directly from you- in order to make it easier to submit feedback we’ve partenered with uservoice to provide two new forums; one for product ideas and the other for bugs. You can access them both at support.extension.fm.
Thank you so much for your support of us and keep the feedback coming- that’s what makes our product!
Played this for the 6yo and 3yo this morning, first time they ever heard it. They’re now sitting downstairs singing “Abiiiiii-yooooooo-yoooooo, Aaaaabiii-yoooooo-yooooo” over and over.
My friend Mark compiled a great list of music blogs on Tumblr and we’ve seen this list grow steadily in the past weeks. It has become great resource to discover new music tumblelogs to follow so I decided to do something similar:
Inspired by Mark, this is a list of folks involved in (but not limited to) entrepreneurship, venture capital, web, tech and business that I highly enjoy reading every day. This is an ongoing list so feel free to post a comment with a link to the blog you think belongs here.
Bijan (VC at Spark Capital, Bijan’s tumblelog was actually the first one I followed)
Finally have the right combo of extensions where I can hide my bookmarks bar in Chrome.
Another really nice feature of Chrome is that it shows your bookmarks bar on the new tab page since there is so much unused room there. No need to have it showing all the time, taking up browsing real estate, with the right combo of extensions replacing bookmarklets.
The pin tab option in Chrome is great. If you want to perma-pin your tabs, instructions are here.
How did you get your bookmarks bar to show on the same row as your address bar? I assume it automatically makes the address box smaller as you add bookmarks.
winenutnyc
filmgirl
musicsavage-blog
exfm
whitneymcn
david-noel
soupsoup
interiorsporn-blog
thebrickhouse
angulargeometry